All Splendid Lovers (Have Just Dreadful Times)
by scotchplaid
Summary: B&W AU take on The Parent Trap. Maddie Martino and Christina Wells (not identical twins separated practically at birth, not even sisters) meet at summer camp and decide to reunite their mothers.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Only in broad strokes will this follow the 1961 original, but there will be deception, misunderstandings, jealousy, well-intentioned interference, and (minor) heartbreak before the gloriously happy ending. The first chapter and most, if not all, of the second will be from Maddie's point of view, but then we switch over to Myka and Helena, with, perhaps, an occasional interruption from the kids.**

Though she didn't know it, she was frequently the subject of the counselors' daily wrap-up. Most of her would have been mortified to know it, but part of her would have been pleased by the attention because it meant that someone, finally, had noticed her. Fifty kids her age at this camp and she hadn't yet found a friend among them.

The counselors were aware of that, too. Maddie Martino was shy; tall for her age, and gawky, her limbs acting independently of each other, she had been hopeless at the physical activities the other shy children had found refuge in, turning over her canoe, serving the volleyball into the net, rolling her ankle on a hike. She had overcompensated in the classroom for her failures elsewhere, too readily answering the counselors' questions about the plants and insects they collected on their hikes, too eager to help the students who were slower to arrive at the difference between an oak leaf and a maple leaf. When the campers were asked to break into groups, she was the one who loitered on the fringes desperate for an invitation, not having the confidence to saunter up to one of the rapidly forming groups of children and take her place among them.

Which was exactly what Christina Wells would do, equally an outsider but for vastly different reasons. She was a sly one, one of the counselors said with a disapproving smile and the others agreed. While she didn't have Maddie's clumsiness when it came to the games and hikes that were part of the children's daily schedule at camp, she was an unenthusiastic participant, her "tender ankles" preventing her from leaping up and pushing the volleyball back over the net as well as answering for why she always lagged behind the other girls as they followed the trails that wound through the woods. A shirker, another counselor announced, describing how Christina's cabin mates would end up making her bed and folding her clothes as she told them tales of her outlandish doings. A liar, yet another counselor volunteered, bragging about her father, an Italian television star named Marco. As if. But clever, they all grimly agreed. "Someone" had picked the lock on the cabinet in which the campers' cell phones and computers were stored during daily activities and at bedtime, picked it, didn't break it. Until the scratches on the lock and the cabinet doors became more numerous and more noticeable, the counselors hadn't been aware that "someone" had been sneaking out of her cabin after hours to take her phone from the cabinet. They had had to start keeping all the electronics in the safe that held the petty cash after that - and make sure they locked the doors.

Perhaps it was time, one of them announced to the others, to reshuffle the cabin assignments. Christina needed new victims to work her wiles upon, and she was undeniably charming. However, while Maddie was shy and awkward, she was smart and perhaps not so gullible as her shyness and awkwardness would have people believe. Not that it was appropriate to pit children against each other, not at all. This was an opportunity for Christina and Maddie to learn from one another, to grow as individuals. They were putting together two girls who, in different ways, were finding it difficult to make lasting friendships with the other campers. There was no entertainment value for them in this, the counselors reassured one another, none at all.

###

Maddie shrugged on the backpack holding her Kindle and actual, real, paper books, a plastic sandwich bag that contained a few necklaces and a wristwatch (presents from her dad over the years), a cheap picture frame in which she had inserted a photo of her and her mom hugging their black lab/German Shepherd mix Remy, and some odds and ends, including half-finished tubes of lip gloss and a plastic case that displayed a piece of masking tape with "Period Stuff" written on it. Camp counselors had already taken her suitcases to her new cabin. Her cabin mates, while a little surprised at the switch, had given her no more than a limp hug or two and then went down to the lake, where they could swim or paddle kayaks and canoes - under supervision, of course - until lunch. She felt that she was being punished, although she couldn't identify the infraction and the counselors had assured her that cabin changes were to be expected. "It's always good to stir up the mix," one of them had brightly told her.

Her new cabin was set apart from the others, tucked more deeply into the trees, and though it wasn't even midday, she could see the shadows stretching across its roof. She didn't hurry along the path, and she slowly climbed the steps to the door. Pressing her nose against the screen, she tried to peer through the gloom. Her bags were in the middle of the floor. Letting the door bang behind her, she shuffled into the main room. Bunk beds lined one wall; across from them was a lounge area, consisting of a loveseat, an armchair, and a bookshelf bowed under the weight of books and puzzles and board games. The loveseat and the chair looked like they could have come from her Grandma Bering's living room, old people's furniture with flowers.

"Hey." The voice came from behind and above her. Maddie turned around. Christina Wells was on the top bunk. "What did you do to get sent here?"

"I don't know," Maddie said, placing her backpack on the bottom bunk. "The counselors said they just change the cabin assignments sometimes. They like to mix things up." She had figured that she would get the bottom bunk, she'd had one of the bottom bunks in the other cabin, too. Things tended to work out that way for her, but at least it was just the two of them in the cabin. Usually there were four girls. Besides, she had heard one of the top bunkers complain about being closer to the bugs, especially spiders, that had taken up residence in the rafters. She wouldn't be sleeping next to the spiders, and if an emergency required them to evacuate the cabin, she was closer to an exit. She could roll out of bed and run for the door. Christina would have to jump down - or burn up.

Christina had stopped hanging her head over the top bunk and was sitting up, watching Maddie take her clothes from her suitcases and put them in her half of the dresser. "You're neat," she observed, and Maddie knew which kind of neat she meant; probably no one except her mother would use "neat" the other way, the being cool way, which would sort of cancel out being cool. Her mother killed cool, literally stomped it out of existence, although Myka Bering would never stomp, hadn't ever stomped for as far back as Maddie could remember. But Myka Bering had been consigned to the bottom bunk when she was a kid, Maddie could guarantee it.

"I like knowing where things are," she said matter of factly, taking a pair of shorts from one of her suitcases.

"But then you're never surprised. Yesterday I found some socks way back in the drawer, which was good 'cause I was out of clean socks."

Christina had sounded more earnest than argumentative, but it still made finding the right response a chancy matter. Maddie didn't want to get off to a bad start with her new cabin mate. Her limited knowledge of Christina hadn't given her the impression that Christina looked for excuses to be mean; on the other hand, she didn't go out of her way to be nice either. Christina floated, not part of any group but mingling with one briefly before moving on to the next, the way a fish would nose among the turrets of a castle dropped on the pebbly bottom of an aquarium before swimming over to check out the treasure chest.

"I also like knowing surprises in advance," Maddie said gravely, waiting a beat or two before grinning up at Christina. Well, she did, so it wasn't much of an exaggeration.

Christina grinned back at her, and they chatted about their experiences at the camp as Maddie emptied her suitcases and started in on her backpack. Jumping to the floor - apparently her "tender ankles" didn't slow her down when it came to getting in and out of the top bunk - Christina said, "It's dinner time. Are you coming?"

Maddie surveyed the contents of her backpack. She could see the outline of her "period stuff" box at the bottom of it. "I will in a few minutes. You don't have to wait."

Christina shrugged. "Okay. See you over there."

Maddie waited until she heard the screen door slam before she took out the case and opened it. Underneath a row of tampons and a few pantiliners (all taken from her mother's supply), which she didn't have any use for, not yet, anyway, was the smartphone she used to talk to her dad. It was against the rules not to declare - and surrender when asked - any electronic device brought to camp. She had declared the smartphone she used to talk to her mom and her laptop, but she wasn't going to surrender what, for the purposes of this extended stay in the woods, was her emergency phone. What if she encountered a bear or a wolf on a midnight trip to the communal bathroom? What if her cabin caught on fire? What if one of her cabin mates got sick from food poisoning? You had to have plans and you had to be prepared. She hadn't been at all sure that simply hiding the phone in a plastic case and scattering a few tampons over it would be enough, but when the camp counselors had gone through her backpack her first day, precisely to find such smuggled treasures, they looked at the case with its Sharpie-marked label and moved on. If one of them had picked it up . . . well, they hadn't, and she was very, very careful with her phone. She had some time to build up its charge before Christina came back. Although she had told herself it was only for emergencies, she would sometimes sit in the bathroom late at night and play games on it. She had to make sure it worked, after all. Her dad would probably call her mom next month about all the extra minutes she had used, but she would worry about that once camp was over.

The next couple of days were like all the ones that had gone before, except that Christina was messier than her old cabin mates, leaving her dirty clothes on the floor and not bothering to make her bed. The first morning Christina had chattered at her as Maddie made her bed and put her pajamas under her pillow, talking a lot about all the famous people she had been able to meet because of her dad and, to a lesser extent, her mom. "Hey," Christina had said cajolingly, "if you make my bed, I'll tell you how I got to meet Taylor Swift. Maybe I can work it so you could meet her, too."

Christina might have met Taylor Swift, but if she had, Maddie suspected it had been the same way any other 11-year-old girl would have met Taylor Swift, standing in line for an autograph at a concert. Besides, while there might be celebrities Maddie would make someone else's bed for the opportunity to meet, Taylor Swift wouldn't be one of them. Not that she had anything against Taylor Swift, she was sure Ms. Swift was perfectly nice and she enjoyed her songs. Now if Christina had said she had met . . . well, most of Maddie's "people I would love to meet" were old-fashioned heroines and long dead, the likes of Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yes, she would make Christina's bed to meet her. "Close but no cigar, as my mom would say. Try me again tomorrow morning," she told Christina. And with that she went to breakfast and sat alone but close enough to a group of girls that she could almost pretend she was one of them.

By the third morning Christina had given up, making her own bed by flinging her blanket over her pillow. She didn't chatter at Maddie nearly as much, apparently because she saw no benefit resulting from it. They might have settled into the distantly friendly acquaintanceship Maddie had had with her former cabin mates, except for two things, both of which happened that third day. The first thing happened after dinner when the campers were allowed to call home and relate the day's adventures to their parents. The two previous nights Christina had climbed to her bunk to make her call, but tonight she sat on the loveseat, and Maddie glimpsed the screensaver on her phone. It was a photo of Christina, a woman who looked too much like her not to be her mother, and a man who looked a lot like the woman. They were dressed as vampires, but even though Christina's mom's was wearing some kind of white make-up, flaring her eyes, and opening her mouth wide to show off her fake fangs, as if she were ready to bite someone's neck, Maddie thought she looked familiar, and not just because Christina resembled her. She would remember where and when she had seen Christina's mother, she just had to be patient and let the memory rise to the surface. It always did. Her mom said they both had prodigious memories. Not photographic memories because those didn't really exist but very, very good memories all the same. She usually smiled when she said it, but at least once she had told Maddie ruefully, "Some days you're better off forgetting."

The second thing happened much later, when Christina found out about her smuggled phone. Maddie thought she had taken her usual care in getting out of her bunk, and then the cabin, without making a sound. She didn't open the case until she was safely locked in a stall in the bathroom. At first she took no notice of the stall door next to hers shutting; girls came in and out, and no one bothered her. She was so absorbed in reading _The War of the Worlds_ , one of her and her mom's favorite books (she had left her paperback copy at home, an oversight she wouldn't commit again) that she nearly dropped her phone in the toilet when, once more, she heard Christina Wells's voice from above.

"I thought you were hiding something. You've been way too sneaky about leaving the cabin in the middle of the night."

Maddie was more familiar than she wanted to be with that tone, the tone that always said "I'm stronger than you" or "I'm bigger than you" no matter what the person was actually saying. The tone always foretold the threat that would come next, which was "Do what I want or I'm going to pound you into the ground/tattle on you/tell everyone in school you wet your pants in class." Her dad urged her to stand up to bullies, while her mom said that they should always report bullying to her teacher and the principal, per school policy. Maddie had found neither a very satisfactory option. Unfortunately she rarely had a better answer, so sometimes she found herself driven head first into a snowbank and sometimes she found herself in the principal's office with her mom, the bully, and the bully's parents all trying to find a "reasonable solution" as the principal called it. (Invariably she would find also find herself in the principal's office with her mom, the bully, and the bully's parents after she had been driven head first into a snowbank.) On rare occasions, however, she had a counteroffer for whatever it was the bully wanted, and tonight was one of those occasions.

"You weren't sneaky enough when you were breaking into the office cabinet for your phone," Maddie said coolly, ignoring Christina's outstretched hand and tucking her phone in a pocket of her shorts.

"How do you know it was me?" Christina didn't take Maddie's ignoring of her hand as a provocation. Instead she used that hand to scratch absently at her other arm, as if she had been intending to put it to work all along and was completely indifferent about whether it grabbed at someone else's phone or scratched at a bug bite.

"Everyone knows it was you," Maddie scoffed, emboldened by Christina's lackadaisical bullying. In fact, it couldn't even be called bullying because Christina hadn't threatened her . . . yet. Just to make sure that there wouldn't be any necessity for bullying, Maddie added with more confidence than she actually felt, "I know how to get your phone out of the safe."

Christina's eyes widened but her mouth remained skeptical. "You do?"

"If you can get us into the counselors' office, I can open the safe."

It turned out that Christina had been getting into the office by climbing onto a low-slung tree branch that ended a few inches from one of the windows. She leaned over and worked at the frame until she could grip the sash and lift it. Maddie stood under the tree and marveled, not at Christina's fearlessness (the drop to the ground was no more than a few feet) but at her brazenness. Granted, there weren't going to be that many people out after midnight, but Christina's hunched-over form was visible in the moonlight. All it would take would be one camp counselor restlessly patrolling the grounds . . . . Sidling closer to the tree trunk, Maddie saw Christina peer at where she had just been standing and hiss so loudly she might as well have been shouting, "Where'd you go? I've got it open."

"Get in before somebody sees us," Maddie ordered irritably. "You just need to unlock a door and then I'll follow you in."

"Gotcha," Christina said in sudden understanding.

Maddie shook her head in dismay. There went a master criminal. Why was she putting her hopes for someday having a social life in Christina's hands? Because if they were caught and it got back to her mom, as it undoubtedly would, she would be grounded until she graduated from high school. Yet she also couldn't deny that this was the most fun she had had since she arrived at camp. She was breaking the rules with a popular girl. Maybe not a popular girl, Maddie amended, but a girl the popular girls accepted, and that was still more than she could have expected to happen to her.

Christina was craning her head around a doorway and urging her to hurry up in that too-loud voice. Maddie ran across the strip of grass that separated the tree from the building and flattened herself against a wall, sliding along it until she met a corner; then she sprinted the last few feet to the door. Christina had disappeared inside, although Maddie easily picked her out from the other shadows. The moonlight was bright, and Christina was the shadow that was hopping and bobbing as though there were surveillance cameras to hide from. But there were no surveillance cameras, just a couch and chairs for the counselors to collapse into when they caught the odd break from attending to the campers, a small first aid station which Maddie had had to visit only once for an application of calamine lotion when a forest hike had left her with a rash on her legs, and a kitchen table and chairs crowded into the corner opposite the first aid station. Straight ahead of them was the office's inner office, which held what appeared to be a true office desk, the cabinet Christina had broken into, and the safe. Watching Christina weave and dip as if she were eluding pursuit, Maddie began to wonder if the reason that Christina had been repeatedly sneaking into the office had nothing to do with her addiction to her phone and everything to do with alleviating boredom. She probably would have broken into the cabinet if there had been only construction paper and glue to steal. Great, Maddie concluded, I'm hanging out with a criminal _and_ an adrenaline junkie. When Christina had been doing all that shouting earlier, she had probably been hoping that she would wake up a counselor.

Somewhere along her circuitous route, Christina had found a flashlight, and she was shining it into the inner office directly at the safe, which presented an old-fashioned combination lock. "What's the combination?" She handed Maddie the flashlight and then crouched in front of the safe, waiting for the magic numbers.

This was it, the make or break moment. If she was right, she could count herself among the coolest kids in camp, if only in her own mind (and, possibly, Christina's too). If she was wrong . . . well, how could it get even lonelier? Failure couldn't make camp a worse experience than it was now, and she couldn't lose Christina as a friend because they weren't friends. There was nothing to break that wasn't already broken, so Maddie said with a casual air, "Try 9, 57, 88, and 31."

"Hold the flashlight still," Christina complained, "I can't see the numbers."

Okay, Maddie acknowledged, maybe she was a little nervous. Gripping the flashlight with both hands, she tried to keep it from shaking. Christina carefully revolved the dial four times and yanked at the handle. The door didn't budge. "It didn't work," Christina sighed.

Maddie already had her phone out, and she was searching intently - not in a panic, absolutely not - for online instructions on how to open a combination lock safe. "Same numbers," she said rapidly, "except turn the dial to the left four times before you stop on 9, to the right three times before you stop on 57, left two times before stopping on 88, and then right, once, stopping on 31." She wasn't holding her breath, not at all, although after Christina completed the sequence as instructed and opened the door, Maddie was gasping for air as if she had been underwater the entire time.

Nothing in recent memory, perhaps her whole life, was sweeter than Christina's awed "How did you know?"

Maddie wanted to revel in the moment, but it would be much cooler if she dismissed the feat as no big deal. "I overheard one of the counselors what the combination was. I've got a pretty good memory." She considered emphasizing that she had overheard the numbers several days ago, but Christina might think she was fishing for compliments, and that would undo all she had achieved. Besides which, she would probably have to reveal that she had overheard the counselors here, in the office, while she was being doused in calamine lotion - for her rash. Nope, the less said about it the better, although Christina's amazement had already faded, and she was pawing through the phones, tablets, and laptops on an inner shelf for her phone. "So, what were you going to do to me if I hadn't suggested this?" Maddie wasn't sure why she suddenly felt lonely with Christina's attention focused on finding her phone. It wasn't like they had magically become best friends, but it had been nice, she had to admit, being part of a team, even if the goal had been something that might get them both kicked out of camp. She was also curious to know what punishment Christina had had in mind. It would have been more inventive than pitching her head first into a snowbank or its summer equivalent, she was sure.

"Do to you?" Christina repeated. She had found her phone and she was scrolling through her messages. It looked like there were a lot of them, and her e-mail icon had a red circle with a number, a big number. Maddie had been receiving just one message a day, a text from her mom. This past weekend she had gotten e-mails from her dad, her Aunt Tracy, and her friend Sophie. She had thought that was pretty good until now. Although who would want a zillion messages? You'd be spending all your time responding to them. Except that Christina didn't seem the responding type; she seemed more of a "I meant to get back to you" type. Yet as soon as that snide little thought crossed Maddie's mind, Christina was saying, "Do to you? Like beat you up or something?" She was genuinely horrified. "No, I was going to suggest we trade. You'd let me use your phone, and I'd get you something you wanted." She turned her phone off and put it back in the safe. Failing to stifle a yawn, she said, "My mom always says that the best way to get what you want is to know what the other person wants." Talking through an even bigger yawn, she offered, "You eat by yourself a lot. I can ask Hannah to invite you to eat with her."

Hannah Sparling. Pretty, athletic, smart, nice, but not so much that you had to resent her for it. Hannah had so many girls clustered around her wanting to be her friend that she probably couldn't see all the other girls on the fringes who also wanted to be her friend. In the dining hall, the counselors had to put two tables together for Hannah and her court. Even if Maddie were the one who sat the farthest away from her, just sitting at Hannah's table was an achievement. If Christina had put this on the table a few hours earlier, Maddie would have snapped it up, but the picture of Christina's mom was niggling at her. She had seen her before, she was sure of it, and though she couldn't have explained why, she knew it was important that she figure it out. She might need Christina's help to do it, and she wasn't going to trade that away, not even for a chance to eat dinner with the most popular girl at camp. Waving good-bye to Hannah in her mind, Maddie said, "Let me think about it. I'm sure I can come up with something."

###

They had made it back to their cabin without being discovered, and it only fueled Christina's desire to do the same thing again the next night and the night after. While Christina muttered as she went through her messages, deleting some and declaring after reading others, "I have to get back to Chloe (or Samantha or Emily or Eric or Will)," Maddie smiled to herself and continued to ferret out from the depths of her memory everything that could possibly tell her why she had recognized Christina's mom, when and where and what she had been doing. It was a trick her mom had taught her if she couldn't remember something - "Start putting together what you _can_ remember." She didn't have much; she was pretty sure she had never met Christina's mom, so that suggested to her that she had seen another photo or a video of her. "Is your mom famous or something? Your dad's an actor, right? Is she an actress?" Maddie had tried to think of all the famous older women she knew, not as old as Ruth Bader Ginsburg but old like her mom, over the past two days but hadn't come up with any who resembled the woman in the photo on Christina's phone.

"My mom sometimes works with actors - it's how she met my dad - but she's not an actress. She and my Uncle Charles run a public relations company, Future Image. My mom says their motto would be 'We make the crisis of today the joke of tomorrow' except that their clients fear being a joke most of all." Christina held her phone out to Maddie. "This is their website."

Christina's mom knew her H.G. Wells. That was interesting, more interesting than the website, which had lots of useless information, descriptions of Future Image's services, client testimonials, a mission statement (whatever that was), and the like. But the website did have pictures of its top officers, Charles Wells and Helena Wells, and now that Maddie could see Christina's mom without the vampire make-up and smiling like a human being instead of baring fake fangs in anticipation of drinking someone's blood, she realized two things; one was that Helena Wells was really pretty, even though there was still something kind of wicked about her smile, and the second was that her mom knew Christina's mom. Maddie didn't have all the pieces yet, but she knew where she had first seen a photo of Helena Wells, in a box of old pictures her mom had stuck in a filing cabinet in her office. She had seen that same smile, only on a much younger version of the woman who was the senior vice president of Future Image.

"Has your mom ever mentioned the name Myka Bering?"

Christina furrowed her eyebrows. "I don't think so. Who's she?"

"My mom."

Christina's brows only furrowed the more. "Why would my mom know your mom?"

Maddie shrugged to show that she didn't consider the question very important, but it was important, even though the why of it continued to elude her. She was afraid, however, that if she pressed Christina too hard, Christina would begin to think she was weird. Weirder, Maddie reluctantly conceded. What kid cared that her mother might know another kid's mother? A kid who stuck out for all the wrong reasons, she answered her own question, a creepy kid. Maddie decided that she would dredge her memory a few more times before asking Christina more questions. "Let's go," she said. "Last night I saw lights on in one of the counselors' cabins as we were leaving." She handed the phone back to Christina.

Christina stared at it unseeingly. "My mom sent me to this camp because she said I needed to get out of my 'comfort zone.'" She dropped her phone into her lap to make the air quotes. "I think she did it because she's getting me ready for when she marries Nate. She told me that coming here would teach me how to get along with all kinds of kids and to get used to being in a new environment." Her frown had turned into a scowl. "I hate the outdoors, and most of the kids here are boring. Just like I hate Nate's house and I think _he's_ boring."

Wow. Maddie hadn't been expecting this. How selfish was it that the first thing she wanted to say was "Do you think I'm boring?" Maybe later she could find a way to work the question in, but right now she should . . . change the subject or let Christina fume? In their short acquaintance, she had never seen Christina like this, scowly and irritated and, just possibly, in need of a friend. Even when Christina was begging off an activity - yesterday a "sore shoulder" had prevented her from canoeing across the lake with the rest of campers - she never crabbed or whined about it. She would always look sorrowfully at the counselor and say with a regret that sounded so sincere that Maddie almost, almost could believe her, "I don't think my shoulder/ankle/knee is up to it today. I heard it pop this morning, and it feels wobbly." Early on, when the counselors had only stared at her in disbelief, Christina would sigh and offer with a puzzled, wondering quality, "My mom says it's genetic, loose ligaments." And once, when an especially impatient counselor had pushed her to do the activity anyway, Maddie had heard Christina deliver the put-away pitch, a 100 mile per hour fastball right down the middle of the plate. "They pushed my uncle so hard at school, running and jumping and all sorts of exercise, that he walks with a cane now." Having envisioned the camp closing under the weight of the resultant lawsuits, the counselors limited themselves to shaking their heads in disgust or gazing skyward in the hopes that lightning would strike Christina for lying before giving in and sending her off to the dining hall or back to her cabin.

Maddie settled on a question that she thought Christina could use either to turn her thoughts from her mom's boyfriend or complain more about him, whatever she preferred. It could also make her unhappier. Why couldn't Christina be making fun of her? That was a situation Maddie knew inside and out. "Do you wish your mom and dad were still together?"

"They were never really together," Christina said casually, putting her phone in the safe. "He was with someone else and my mom always said she wasn't the marrying kind." She paused. "That's what she used to say . . . before Nate." As they exited the cabin through the window (while they had to lock the doors from the inside, Maddie couldn't honestly regret the extra little risk that climbing out the window added to the adventure), Christina said, with a return of her customary breeziness, "I'm the product of a night of passion." Then she said, almost condescendingly, "I wasn't a twinkle in my parents' eyes, I was a fire. Not everyone can say that, you know." Maddie had the feeling that the words weren't Christina's own, that she was parroting words her mother had told her over and over.

"Do you get to see him often? He lives in Italy, right?"

"I don't know him very well," Christina admitted. "He doesn't have a lot of time off from his show, so I don't see much of him."

This time Maddie thought she was parroting the excuses her father had told her over and over. Assuming the television part was true, assuming the Italy part was true. Maddie knew a little something about the paternal penchant for exaggeration and invention, especially when it came to missed visits and late child support payments (although she wasn't supposed to know about the latter).

"How about you?"

"What?" Startled, Maddie stepped on a twig that snapped as loud as a gunshot, the sharp crack reverberating through the camp.

"Are your parents together?"

"No, they got divorced when I was little." Not baby little, more like kindergarten little, but Maddie didn't have many memories of her dad and mom together. Not happy together, anyway. There hadn't been many fights, but there had been lots of silence. She almost remembered the silences better than she did her dad, and it wasn't because she had trouble remembering him. She didn't have much material to work with. "I don't see him much either," she volunteered. She kept her voice low; no lights had come on after she stepped on the twig and none of the counselors were calling "Who's out there?," but she didn't want to draw any more attention to them. "He's not an actor, and he doesn't live halfway across the world, but he travels a lot."

Sam Martino worked in the development department of a big state university. Maddie had asked her mom once what her dad's job actually was because her mom usually knew everything, and, since she worked at a college herself, she would certainly know about development departments. But her mom had disappointed her, because, instead of gushing like the fountain of knowledge she ordinarily was and pointing out ten zillion books or websites as resources for even more information, her mom had said only, "He raises money for the university." Not very enlightening, but luckily her Aunt Tracy had chimed in, "He goes around the country and visits alumni and asks them for money. Which means he gets paid to drink beer and attend football games and reminisce about the good old days. In other words, honey, your dad's being paid to never grow up." Her mom had said sharply, "Tracy, that's enough," and Aunt Tracy had pinched her finger and thumb together and drawn them across her lips, like she was zipping them together, but not before she muttered, "It's true, and it's always been your weakness, Myka."

Christina said, not in a low voice but conversationally, as though they weren't sneaking back from breaking into the office, "My Uncle Charles is more like a dad to me than my real dad. He calls me every week, and we text each other all the time."

Maddie didn't have that kind of relationship with any of her uncles, not that she was looking for a more dad-like dad. She had her mom and her Aunt Tracy, and that was plenty. Besides, sometimes Pete Lattimer, her old soccer coach, would say that she was his third kid, and while she knew he was just joking, it felt kind of good all the same. If she ever had a serious problem, she wouldn't hesitate to talk to him about it. She would keep that to herself, however; it would probably sound pathetic to say, "The guy who taught me soccer when I was six is my backup dad."

Thankfully they were close to their cabin now, so it didn't matter so much that Christina was talking as if she were trying to be heard over the other campers in the dining hall. "It's not that I don't want my mom to be happy or to get married if she wants to. If she wanted to marry her friend Gigi, I'd be all for it. They used to date, and I loved having her around all the time, but they broke up. My Uncle Charles said it was like putting two piranhas in a fishbowl, it just wasn't going to work. But I wish it had."

Maddie slowed. Her mind was working so fast that she couldn't walk and think at the same time. She plopped down on the steps to their cabin door. It was turning out that she and Christina had a great deal in common for two girls who, on the outside, would seem to have nothing in common. "My mom has girlfriends, too," she said, not really caring if Christina heard her. "She used to go out with this professor named Michelle, then they broke up, like your mom and Gigi, and my mom was really sad . . . ."

All the pieces were there, and Maddie knew exactly what she had been doing and where she had been when she had seen the photo of Helena Wells. "I think . . . ." Christina was stomping around the inside of their cabin, slamming dresser drawers. "I think," Maddie spoke louder, but it was hard to shout out something when you were still marveling over it.

"What'd you say?"

Maddie turned around. Christina was at the screen door, wearing her pajamas. It was late, and tomorrow was going to be a full day, chock full of nature walks, water safety lessons, fire safety lessons, first aid lessons, more nature walks. She should have been growing tired just thinking of it all, but she wouldn't be getting much rest tonight. Her mind wasn't going to be slowing down anytime soon.

"I think our moms used to be girlfriends."


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Sorry for the length but I wanted to get to a certain point before I launched into Chapter 3. Yes, I take a few potshots, but I also like creamed corn (that will make more sense after you read the chapter). Helena and Myka will start taking center stage, but we're not through with hearing from the girls - maybe even Christina (if I think I can find the right voice for her). Updates are running about eight weeks out if you're wondering when I'll have Chapter 3 up.**

 _Fate Brought Us Together_

Maybe. That had been her response. Christina had caught no fire from Maddie's excitement. Scratching her ankle with her other foot, Christina had considered it for a moment before saying, "Maybe. My mom's had a lot of girlfriends," and then running and shimmying up the bed frame to the top bunk. Adding insult to indifference, if not injury, she had hollered, "How long are you going to be out there? I want to turn off the light."

Staring at the bed above her, listening to Christina's slightly adenoidal breathing, which wasn't a snore but a growly inhalation that was perilously close to one, Maddie was appalled that Christina could take such a revelation so casually. How could she be so . . . so Christina-ish about it? Wasn't she amazed at the coincidence? Wasn't she curious? "My mom's had a lot of girlfriends." Christina wouldn't have tossed off a comment like that one if Myka Bering were her mother. But that was it - Myka Bering wasn't her mother. She didn't know Myka Bering, which meant she couldn't know "having a lot of girlfriends" was simply not something Myka Bering did, or had ever done, as far as Maddie knew. Most of all, Christina hadn't seen what she had witnessed, and had she, she would be wide awake, too.

Maddie had seen the photo of Helena Wells when her mom had been obsessed with cleaning their house from top to bottom. Her mom was neat by nature, but when she was upset about something she could go into ultra-cleaning mode. She had been really upset when she had broken up with Michelle for the second time, more with herself than with Michelle. Between directing Maddie to straighten her room and then asking her in the next breath to bring her a bucket of warm, soapy water and rubber gloves, her mom had been muttering, "Stupid . . . stupid. I should've known she would go back to Gwen. And what do I care, anyway? It's not like she's the love of my life." She had quieted down when Maddie, slopping only a little of the water out of the bucket, brought it into the main floor office. "Sorry, honey. You shouldn't have to listen to this. If I can't say anything pleasant, maybe we should just listen to some music, okay?"

Her mom had had already emptied the desk drawers, piling their contents in a corner of the room. She was hovering over a laptop, bringing up Spotify. Maddie knew the "sad Myka" playlist - Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, and a bunch of other singers singing songs that would make her mother only sadder - she would rather listen to her mother's complaints. "It's okay, Mom. I know that you really liked Michelle." Her mom smiled wanly at her and took the bucket and moved it closer to the file cabinet. Maddie had left unsaid and she hoped, unperceived, that she wasn't nearly as sad as her mom that Michelle had gone back to her old girlfriend.

It wasn't that Michelle wasn't nice. Michelle was nice to a fault, always wanting to reach a consensus about what to have for dinner or what TV show to watch. She and Maddie's mom would defer to each other's opinion - and to their respective child's opinion - so often that dinner was sometimes an inedible mishmash of the few foods that Ethan, Michelle's son, would eat (applesauce, tofu, organic macaroni and cheese,) and the stir-fry or oven-baked chicken breasts that Myka had been planning to make. Maddie would frequently go up to her bedroom and watch TV on her computer since Michelle and her mom wouldn't decide on a show before her bedtime. They even sort of looked alike, her mom and Michelle, both with long, curly brown hair and green eyes, although Maddie, naturally, thought her mother was prettier. Michelle thought Maddie's mom was pretty too, which, like many things Michelle did, grated on Maddie, though she earnestly reminded herself that she shouldn't resent the fact that Michelle found her mom attractive. Maybe it was nothing more than overhearing the two arguing one late afternoon about an event they were planning to attend on campus that evening, Michelle taking exception to Myka's decision to wear make-up, chiding her for "pandering to heterosexist expectations" and Myka responding with irritation, "Does everything have to be a message? I _want_ to wear make-up. People, even old-school feminists, Michelle, dress up for a performance like this." That was as heated as their arguments ever became and they typically ended as this one had ended, with the two calling each other "Sweetie" and then giggling, as it was clear from the sounds accompanying the giggles that they were kissing. Granted, the kissing sounds were kind of disgusting, but Maddie thought she should be happy that her mom had found someone so . . . compatible. That was the word her Grandmother Bering used when she was advising Maddie on what to look for when she was old enough to date. Cute, smart, funny, none of it mattered if you didn't have interests in common, her grandmother would avow. Maddie couldn't think of a thing that Michelle and her mom fundamentally disagreed on, except Gwen.

Gwen was Michelle's former partner and, as her mom always seemed to need to remind Aunt Tracy, "Gwen's the primary caregiver for their son, Trace," to which Aunt Tracy invariably replied, "I bet Michelle never lets you forget it either." Her mom wouldn't acknowledge the dig, but Maddie had overheard her say to Michelle more than once with the strained patience she would use with Maddie, "You don't have to go over there every single time she calls. I know she thinks this is a crisis with Ethan, but _everything_ can't be a crisis with him." Ethan had a cold or he refused to ride the school bus or he was hiding under his bed because he was frightened of thunderstorms. There was always something new with Ethan and it was always something awful. The first time her mom and Michelle dated, they broke up after four months because, as Maddie's mom explained it, "Michelle and Gwen still needed to work some things out." Her mom played her sad songs and watched an old black and white movie a zillion times and recited the dialogue right along with the actors, and then she was okay with the break-up, and Maddie could consign the past four months to the place in her memory where she put all the stuff she had no intention of remembering. But less than a year later, her mom and Michelle started dating again because, it seemed, all those things that Michelle and Gwen had needed to work out had been worked out. Michelle was eating dinner with them now and staying over on the weekends that Maddie wasn't spending at her Aunt Tracy's or (more rarely) with her dad. Dinner was late again or was the same inedible mishmash (with creamed corn being added to the mix for Ethan, much to Maddie's disgust), and she went back to watching TV on her computer while Michelle and her mom endlessly debated whether one night of watching _The Voice_ was a concession to the "intellectually stunting effect of family-oriented network programming." Her mom was happy, and that was important, although sometimes Maddie wondered just how happy her mom was with Michelle. She smiled more and laughed harder with Aunt Tracy or Pete Lattimer when shouldn't it have been the other way around?

Then it went bad again, because of Gwen again, although after Michelle hadn't come over one weekend because Gwen's nerves were "shot" dealing with Ethan's latest misfortune and Michelle had wanted to provide her support because Gwen wasn't just Ethan's other mom but because they had a history that it wouldn't be fair to deny, Maddie's mom had said, "It's pretty clear that your history with her is more important than your relationship with me, so let's make it a clean break this time." Or that's what Maddie's mom told Aunt Tracy when she thought Maddie was up in her bedroom. "I didn't let Michelle drag it out. I saw what was happening, and I ended it. I was strong, Trace, aren't you proud of me?" She had sounded composed and okay with the break-up while Aunt Tracy was there, but once Aunt Tracy had left, the hyper-cleaning had begun. Which was why Maddie was in her mother's office with her mom and a bucket of water and gloves and watching her mom take everything out of the file cabinet preparatory to cleaning it. And who cleaned their desk drawers and file cabinets with soap and water? Wouldn't it be a better use of her time to be cleaning the oven or the downstairs windows as her mom had been muttering that she needed to do for weeks? But Maddie understood that no matter how much her mom said she valued a logical, practical approach to life, reminding her that cleaning the file cabinet wasn't the most logical, practical thing to do wouldn't be appreciated.

It was among the file cabinet's old file folders, binders, and piles of paper held together with rubber bands that Maddie had seen a picture of Helena Wells. A picture, not _the_ picture, because there was a ton of pictures of her spilling out from a cardboard box whose sides were becoming unglued from each other. Her mom had almost frantically swept the pictures together on the floor, as if she were afraid she might lose some of them if she didn't. If she hadn't been so unMom-like, so unglued about it, Maddie wouldn't have been so keen to look at the pictures. She was always embarrassed when her mom brought out the album with her baby pictures or played the video of her dressing up for her first day of school, and while pictures of her mom when she was a little girl were mildly interesting for their dork factor, she didn't look at them all the time or anything like that. Maybe these pictures had something sexy, for adults only because there was no other reason for her mom to act as if the pictures were worth a million dollars. But when Maddie said, "I'll get it," and went to pick up the one that had slid under the desk, her mom wasn't saying "No, honey, don't bother" like she had when Maddie had taken a pair of thong panties from the laundry basket and turned them back and forth trying to figure how to fold them. Her mom wasn't blushing like she had then; instead she sounded grateful, "Thanks, Maddie."

The picture was of her mom and another woman sitting on a step in a wide sweep of concrete steps ending at a row of columns, which fronted a building that looked old and official at the same time. It looked like the kind of building that you would see in a movie or TV show, maybe a courthouse or city hall. Her mom and the woman were really young, and they had their arms around each other's shoulders and their heads were so close together they were almost touching as they looked at the camera. The other woman was looking at the camera, Maddie's mom was looking at the woman. The only time Maddie had ever seen an expression like that on her mother's face was in her own baby pictures, when her mom was holding her, so gooey-eyed with love she was on the verge of tears. Maddie had to put those pictures face down she was so embarrassed by that look. But that was how her mom was looking at her friend, except no one looked at a friend like that. That was the "I don't know how I could love you any more than I do" look, which was always how Myka explained those baby pictures that it killed Maddie (but not really) to see, the way Maddie could already guess that her mom had never looked at her dad, the way she knew that her mom had never looked at Michelle.

The fact that a young Myka Bering had been head over heels for a young Helena Wells was, yes, astonishing in its own way, but it wasn't enough to keep Maddie up all night and staring at the bunk above and listening to its occupant sleep as if she were muttering, not words but a string of nonsense syllables, under her breath. Not awake all night with excitement, anyway, maybe a weirdly shared sense of shame, because there was something so hopeful, so happy in her mom's face that it just wasn't right - hope like that was bound to be disappointed. Even Maddie was old enough to know that. But in the middle of all those pieces of elbows and shirts and jeans and guitars and other people as the pictures Maddie's mom wasn't even bothering to try to put into order slipped over and under each other, cutting off Maddie's view of any one picture in its entirety, she saw what amounted to three-quarters of a picture, her mom and the other woman together on a really ratty couch in someone's apartment. Her mom was asleep, her head on the other woman's lap, and the woman was looking down at Maddie's mom, which made it kind of hard to see her expression, but what Maddie could make out looked similarly dazed, like What do I do with all this . . . love?

Helena Wells, despite the picture of her on Future Image's website that suggested there was nothing that could overwhelm her, was as ridiculous as Maddie's mom. She probably had her own black-and-white movie whose dialogue she could recite word for word and a break-up playlist as well. Maybe it had been a hundred years ago, but these two had loved each other, deeply, truly. Of course, when Maddie had asked her mom, very tentatively, about who the woman was, because if Michelle could make Myka Bering watch old movies and play sad songs and give the house a spring cleaning when it was the middle of winter, who knew what talking about this other woman might do to her, Maddie's mom had only laughed this weird-sounding laugh and said, "An old friend from college, I can barely remember her name." Then she had hurried out of the office only to return with a plastic storage container, slim enough to fit into a file cabinet drawer, and she had put the pictures in it without saying another word about who the woman was or what had become of their "friendship." They hadn't cleaned the file cabinet that day or the office; in fact, her mom's desire to clean the house completely vanished and, instead, she called Aunt Tracy to come over and watch with her the episodes she had missed of _The Voice_.

As she lay in her bunk, sleepless, Maddie felt the stirrings of an idea, as if all the stray bits of information filling her head - her knowledge of who Christina was, who the woman in her mother's photographs was, how her mom and Helena Wells had felt about each other when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (one of her Grandmother Bering's favorite sayings), how much Christina didn't like her mom's fiancé, how much she feared that Michelle and her mom might get back together for a third time - were being blown like leaves into a pile. She didn't even have to work to collect them; they were already there. When, after dinner the next day, she read her mother's text message, it was too fitting, as if the course of the universe, which she usually believed was set to painfully collide with her, was running parallel with her. She and the universe were in sync because her mother's text said, "Hey, honey, a quick note to say 'I love you' because I'm meeting Michelle for breakfast. DON'T WORRY [then there was a smiley face emoji], we're just friends now." When she talked to her mom, her mind busily working over her options if, regardless of what her mom said, she and Michelle were becoming more than friends (again), Maddie trotted out the phrases that would make any mother pleased that she had decided to send her daughter to summer camp – "I'm having a great time with the other girls" and "I spiked the ball over the net to win the match" and "I could name three berries and four flowers on our hike today." After she and her mom said goodnight, Maddie didn't have to think about it; Aunt Tracy was on her speed dial. She had ten minutes left in which to maintain contact with the outside world.

"Hey, Mads, what's up?" Aunt Tracy always sounded glad to hear from her, even if, as Maddie sometimes suspected, she wasn't calling at the best time.

Despite the fact that Aunt Tracy frequently came over whenever Maddie's mom called or invited Maddie to spend the weekend with her, she did have Uncle Kevin, who would want her attention, too. Just because he seemed more spectral than really, truly present, offering a distant "Hi" to Maddie before disappearing into his TV room or office for hours didn't mean Aunt Tracy saw him that way. While Maddie wasn't sure that if he ever vanished she would be able to provide a detailed description of him, unable to recall any distinguishing feature except that he was tall and wore glasses, Aunt Tracy could probably identify every mole on his body. It wasn't going to be just Aunt Tracy and Uncle Kevin for much longer either. Aunt Tracy was going to have a baby, "my first and last," she maintained. Having been "the child of my heart" all these years for her aunt - and even though Aunt Tracy would clasp her hands over her heart and give Maddie a goofy grin as she said it, Maddie knew she meant it - Maddie was going to be dislodged come December.

If Maddie were being honest, Aunt Tracy sounded a little tired, ready to have a chat if Maddie needed it but tired all the same. Maddie wanted to take pity on her, but she couldn't; this was too important. Even though she also wanted to know if her mom was doing "just friends" things with Michelle or if more was going on than her mom wanted to admit, Maddie had under nine minutes before she had to surrender her phone, and the mystery of Helena Wells took precedence over the nightmare of Michelle. On her bunk, Christina was loudly, and atonally, singing a Taylor Swift song that she was listening to through her headphones, but Maddie still lowered her voice as she asked, "Did my mom go out with a woman named Helena Wells?"

Aunt Tracy whistled softly. "That's a blast from the past. How did you come up with her name?"

"Her daughter has the bunk above me." Aunt Tracy laughed or maybe she choked. It was hard for Maddie to tell over the phone. Precious seconds, however, were being eaten up by her aunt's coughing and gasping for breath. "Just tell me, how does my mom know Helena Wells?" Maddie pressed.

"Whoa, hold on there. Piece of advice, don't ever say that name around your mother. Remember your Harry Potter, Helena Wells is She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

"She's Voldemort?" There was the picture of her as a vampire, but in the pictures of her from the depths of the file cabinet, Helena Wells had looked like a normal girl, not one planning to exercise her dominion over the universe. And while Christina could be annoying and smug and - well, she wasn't mean or bad. So her mom couldn't be absolutely horrible, could she?

"Your mom might like to think so, but Helena's worst sin was that she was young. They both were." Aunt Tracy's voice became gentle, as if she were ready to dispense some grown-up wisdom. "I'm just trying to say that her name holds a lot of power for your mom." Maddie waited for the inevitable "Someday you'll know exactly what I'm talking about," but Aunt Tracy had already moved on. "If you're going to ask her about Helena Wells, all I'm saying is, go easy."

"That's why I'm asking you. Mom came across some old pictures of her after she and Michelle broke up, you know, the second time -"

"Oh my God," Tracy interrupted with a dramatic sigh. "That was the time she had me come over and watch _The Voice_ , _Casablanca_ , and _Love Actually_ with her all in one night."

The minutes were ticking away and Maddie still hadn't gotten an answer to her question. Instead she had heard her aunt practically choke to death, compare Helena Wells to Voldemort, caution her to "go easy," and complain about a night of binge watching TV. Sometimes it was all too easy to remember that Aunt Tracy and her mom were sisters. "Christina says she's never heard of a Myka Bering."

"Who's Christina - never mind," Aunt Tracy said, answering her own question, "she must be her kid." That she was frowning was apparent in her tone. "Don't go telling your mother that Helena's never mentioned her, I'm not up for another go-around of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman." An even more dramatic sigh. "You also can't tell your mother this, but if gay marriage had been the law almost 20 years ago, she would have been dragging Helena to the altar. That's what Helena Wells meant to your mom."

…

Maddie said she had a plan, but she didn't really. It was what she needed to say to attract Christina's interest. Christina wasn't into the actual planning part of plans; she liked the concept of them. Plans, schemes, covert missions - anything that involved secrecy, code words, disguises, deception, Christina was all for it. In theory. When it came to thinking through a mission, identifying the steps to be taken, that was when she lost interest. It explained why Christina was crawling out on a tree limb to work open a window into the counselors' office to steal back her phone, and why Maddie, in planning for all the emergencies that might happen at a summer camp, had decided upon a more efficient method, secreting a second one. Maddie might have waited another day or she might have chosen, albeit reluctantly, not to say anything more about their mothers because she didn't have an idea, let alone a plan. She had only names (Myka, Helena, Michelle, Nate), anxieties about a future in which Michelle and Ethan were fixtures in her and her mother's lives, and a growing belief that her mother and Helena Wells were inextricably and eternally linked (like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, only much less tragically, she hoped). Then there was another text from her mom, saying she was excited to be bringing her home from camp in a few days and suggesting that they could take in a movie . . . one that she and Michelle had already seen with Ethan. Her mom was sure she would love it.

Maddie had no choice after reading the text. Waiting until after the counselors had collected their phones for the evening, Maddie tugged at the leg that Christina was dangling over the side of her bunk. "Hey," another tug when Christina's head didn't pop up, "hey, how badly do you want Nate out of your mom's life? Because I've got a plan."

The leg was retracted, and Maddie had a moment to consider whether she had gone about it all wrong before Christina hung her head over the bed, eyeing Maddie intently. "Unless it's hiring a hit man or something else that'll get us thrown in prison, I'm in."

"Get him out of her life, not get rid of him," Maddie said in exasperation.

Christina shrugged, unfazed by Maddie's annoyance, just as she was unfazed when Maddie would cough very loudly and pick up a t-shirt or a damp towel from the floor where _someone_ had dropped it. Christina would shrug and advise her, "Toss it in the corner if it's in the way." Being unfazed wasn't responsive, wasn't helpful, wasn't . . . listening to her. Maddie swallowed a sigh; she wished she could so negligently lift a shoulder like that. But there were those who shrugged their shoulders, and there were those who put their shoulders to the wheel. She had a potentially balky wheel to turn, and its name was Christina. She needed to move to the next step, which was to come up with a plan, and to do that, she needed to confirm that Helena Wells also had a box of old pictures stuck in the back of a file drawer. "We need to talk to your Uncle Charles tonight."

When Christina flopped back onto her pillow in her own demonstration of annoyance, Maddie recognized she had lost some ground when she explained that they needed to ask Charles Wells about her mother. "So what if our moms went out? What's that got to do with breaking up my mom and Nate?" Scornfully Christina added, "My uncle Charles has probably never heard of Myka Bering."

"Trust me, he has." Maddie mustered all the nonchalance she had within her and spent it on those four words. She desperately hoped that tonight wouldn't be the night the counselors would greet them outside the office, training flashlights on them like they were convicts caught in a prison break, because she would crumble. She was out on a limb with this plan-that-wasn't-even-a-plan, and not the limb they used to get in and out of the office, a really small, weak limb that was like a thousand feet above the ground. All her daring was bound up in it. If they were caught tonight, she would fall shamelessly at the counselors' feet and weep and plead for mercy.

Seeing that Christina had yet to move from her pillow, Maddie dispensed with nonchalance and tried persuasion. "I mean your mom and your uncle are close, right? They run that company together. I bet she tells him a bunch of stuff she wouldn't think to tell you." Then, fearing that her words had sounded neither nice nor persuasive and might have suggested, instead, a suspicion that Christina's mother never told her daughter anything, she added, "You know, things that happened before you were born."

Christina sat up, shrugged again, this time in dismissal of the importance of anything that occurred before she was born, and then jumped to the floor. "They're not lovey-dovey, if that's what you're getting at. He always says he wouldn't turn his back on her or meet her in a dark alley without carrying a weapon, but he's just kidding." She rooted around in Maddie's backpack for her other phone. "I'm pretty sure he's kidding, anyway." She handed the phone to Maddie. "I'm bored. Let's play some games on it before we call him."

And with that Christina had apparently decided, regardless of her doubts about the utility of it, to talk to her Uncle Charles, leaving Maddie to conclude that, on some level, her cabin mate would always remain a mystery to her.

Christina was no mystery to her Uncle Charles, whose booming laugh some two and a half hours later, practically rattled the walls of the office, which had Maddie jumping up and casting anxious looks at the door. Recovering from his initial surprise at getting a call from his niece at 7:30 in the morning London time, Uncle Charles, once he confirmed that there was no emergency (although Maddie would beg to differ), exploded in laughter when Christina described how she came to be calling him. "A Wells will always find his - or her - way around a rule. Initiative, ingenuity, and more than a dash of fearlessness - good show, Christina." He sounded as proud as if she had won an award for Best Camper or aced a quiz on poisonous plants.

As Maddie tried to wrap her mind around being praised for being bad, Christina explained, "Uncle Charles, it's really my, um, friend Maddie who had the idea about unlocking the safe. It was because the counselors discovered that I was picking the cabinet lock that all our phones and stuff were put into the safe in the first place."

There was silence in the office and silence on the phone as Maddie and, apparently, Uncle Charles needed some time to absorb Christina's disclosure. Maddie wasn't sure what shocked her more, that Christina had called her a friend or that she hadn't taken all the credit, although "credit" was a weird word to use when it came to trespassing, breaking and entering, and what some might consider stealing. With a gruff clearing of his throat, Uncle Charles said cajolingly, as though he felt Christina might have taken his silence as a sign of his disappointment, "It's also showing initiative when you're smart enough to identify who has the skill set you need. Good thinking, Christina, and tell your friend that with a memory for information like that, well, she'll end up a master criminal or _Jeopardy_ champion."

"She's here with me, Uncle Charles. Actually it's sort of why we want to speak with you -"

The booming laugh had grown uneasy. "You'll forget, won't you, ah, Maddie, is it? You'll forget my comment about becoming a master criminal because breaking curfew and stealing phones from a safe, while they may be all right as an occasional prank, they shouldn't become habits. I wouldn't you want you to think I'm encouraging my niece to become a juvenile delinquent. No, no, staying in school, applying yourself to your studies, learning to be productive, law-abiding citizens . . . ."

Christina giggled. "Don't worry. Maddie could break into a million safes and she'd still be the most honest person ever."

Maddie wasn't going to dispute the truth of it, but did Christina have to act as though the thought of her as a master criminal was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard of? Uncle Charles was mumbling, "Glad to hear it, glad to hear it." Then he asked briskly, leaving behind the awkwardness of seeming to have encouraged two eleven-year-old girls to adopt a life of crime, "What is it that I can help you with? Don't want you staying up too late, you know."

"Maddie wants to know if you knew her mom way back when, like before she was born."

There was another silence and another strained laugh. "You should keep in mind, girls, that's rather a loaded question to be asking a bachelor in his 40s." And again there was the briskness, as if another pitfall were narrowly being avoided. "What makes you think I might know your mother, Maddie?"

"Because she was . . . uh . . . friends with Christina's mom. I thought you might know her too. Her name is Myka Bering."

"Myka Bering . . . Myka Bering . . . . . . Myka Bering." The more Uncle Charles repeated the name the more his voice began to resemble Helena Wells's smile in her Future Image photograph, a little wicked and more than a little pleased with his wickedness. "I knew of her, Maddie, although I never had the pleasure of meeting her. She and my sister were very close friends when they were in college. Very close."

Christina and Maddie spoke simultaneously.

"Very close as in girlfriend close? Because Mom never said anything about dating a Myka - "

"You can say they were girlfriends, Mr. Wells. My mom says she doesn't believe in labels, but she's pretty gay. My Aunt Tracy says my dad was the exception that proves the rule, and I guess -"

Uncle Charles's sigh was loud too. It was gusty, gusty enough that Maddie automatically slammed her hand down on some stray paper on the desk. "Let me address your comments by saying this. Christina, there are many things concerning your mother about which you know nothing, nor should you, until you reach a certain age. Among those are certain amours, affairs of the heart," he immediately translated, although Maddie wanted to assure him that no such translation had been necessary for her. "Ms. Bering was such a one, and I fear I'm being indiscreet even in revealing that." Once more Uncle Charles sounded rather pleased with himself, leaving Maddie with the impression that he would like nothing better than for Helena Wells to have to talk about Myka Bering.

"Shades of Hayley Mills," he exclaimed, "the daughters of Myka Bering and Helena Wells meeting at summer camp. Who could have possibly imagined this happening? Christina, how did your mother happen upon the marvelous idea of sending you to camp? And it just happens to be the very same camp to which Myka Bering sends her daughter. What a stunning coincidence." It seemed that Uncle Charles was changing the subject, a little, but there was something about the smug amusement in his chuckle that suggested he didn't think the unlikeliness of their meeting all that unlikely. Maddie knew he was saying something if only she were smart enough - old enough - to understand what it was.

"She sent me to camp because I told her I didn't want her to marry Nate," Christina growled.

Maddie needed to get the Wellses to refocus on what was important. "My Aunt Tracy said that my mom and your sister, Mr. Wells, were serious about each other, that my mom would've married her if she could have." At that, Christina spun her head toward Maddie, her mouth dropping into an O of surprise. "Is that true?"

"That's a story you should hear from your mother, Maddie." Uncle Charles said it gently, seriously. His voice wasn't booming or sighing, and Maddie thought that this might be how he talked when he wasn't playacting for the benefit of two kids.

After sternly encouraging them to go to bed and quit tempting fate by sneaking into the office - Maddie was pretty sure there was a big wink in that last piece of advice - Uncle Charles wished them a goodnight and ended the call. Christina put her phone back into the safe and shut the door. "You were right, as usual," she conceded. "But what does it matter when it happened so long ago?"

"Because, to my mom, it didn't happen long ago, not really, and I bet the same is true for your mom."

Maddie had been hoping that Christina would magically divine the plan that was still basically a muddle of stray thoughts and wishes. That way she wouldn't have to try and explain it to her, but Christina remained stubbornly fixated on why something that began and ended long before they were born mattered now. Why would Maddie believe that two people who hadn't seen each other in years and years and years could still be having a love affair?

"Not a love affair, in love."

Christina didn't find the clarification clarifying. "How can you be in love with somebody who doesn't know or care where you are, who forgot about you a long time ago?"

Of course Christina wouldn't understand; she had never been invisible. Maddie knew she was invisible to J.P. Lattimer, invisible to him as a girl anyway, but it didn't change the fact that someday she was going to marry him. It was okay that in his mind, if he thought about her at all, she was still the clumsy little girl on the soccer team his dad had coached because one day she was going to exist for him as a girl he found pretty, whom he could love. Maddie absolutely believed that her mother could be in love with Helena Wells, even after all these years, even if she had never heard from Helena since they had broken up. It was the Berings' lot, mother and daughter, to pine, and Maddie suspected that it was the Wellses' lot, mother and daughter, to be the pinee.

"Let's pretend that our moms still care about each other. Think what might happen if we find ways of putting them together. Maybe Nate won't look so great in your mom's eyes, and maybe my mom won't keep trying to make things work with her ex, Michelle."

"How are we going to do that? Once we leave camp, we'll probably never see other again."

That was all too likely, which meant that she and Christina would need to invent reasons to continue to see each other. They didn't have much time since the end of camp was fast approaching. Maddie had come up with one reason, a fabrication to a large extent and at odds with Christina's butterfly-like approach to social relationships, but short of discovering that they were twins separated at birth, it was their best bet. "We're going to tell our moms that we became best friends, and that we want to hang out together, like all the time."

Christina made a face and then, catching herself, blushed. "Sorry. I mean you're okay and everything. Like I said before, you're more interesting than the other kids here, but I don't do the best friend thing, share lunches and all that stuff. It makes me itch." She started scratching her forearm, as if she were emphasizing her point.

"I've already got a best friend," Maddie said, thinking of Sophie and cringing at having to tell her that they couldn't read the _Divergent_ series all the way through again or finish the _Raven Cycle_ together because she was too busy spending her free time with Christina.

"Besides, no offense, if my mom's going to get back together with someone, I want it to be Gigi, not your mom."

She wasn't offended, but Maddie was irked. Sure, her mom was a dork most of the time, and she didn't do anything as cool as run a company, but Christina was rejecting her without having met her. "No offense, but your mom sounds like a bit of a drama queen, and I've had enough of that with Michelle."

Christina nodded, a thoughtful expression on her face. "I get that. My mom _is_ kind of a drama queen."

"If we do this, it's not because we're really going to be best friends or because we're trying to put our moms together. We're doing it because we don't like the people they're with. As soon as your mom breaks up with Nate and my mom gives up for good on Michelle, we're done." Maddie held out her hand. "Agreed?"

Christina scratched violently at her arm before saying in resignation, "I don't have a better plan." She shook Maddie's hand. "Agreed."

The crucial step in their plan, because everything would follow from it or, in the event that it turned out to be an utter disaster, would fail to follow from it, was their mothers' reunion. Christina entertained the simple idea of having their mothers run into each other as they lugged their daughters' suitcases and other belongings to their respective cars on the day camp ended. "You know, a 'Hey, how are you,' low-key kind of thing, no pressure," she recommended from her bunk the next morning.

Maddie was aghast, mainly because Christina seemed to have no thought of setting up the reunion for maximum impact but also because they had only five minutes before they were due on the beach where the canoes were stored and Christina was still in her pajamas. "This is Edward and Bella - you don't have them seeing each other for the first time in forever at their kids' summer camp. They can't suspect, they can't know they're going to meet. It's their surprise that's going to tell us whether any of this has a chance of working. It has to be like a thunderclap."

Christina reasonably pointed out, as Maddie had to admit, that they couldn't hide their mothers' identities for very long. "My mom's going to want to know what your mother's name is if we'll be spending all this time together. I can't keep telling her 'Maddie's mom' this and 'Maddie's mom' that. They'll be doing that parenty thing. 'Where did you meet her?' 'Who's her mom?' 'Is she okay with this?'"

After a half-hour of paddling their canoe in circles and, at one point, nearly driving it across the bow of another canoe - which earned them demerits they would have to work off by undergoing additional water safety instruction in the afternoon - Maddie and Christina had settled upon how they were going to reintroduce their mothers. Maddie didn't like it because it wasn't sufficiently dramatic and Christina didn't like it because it required too much work, but Maddie sagely advised her that it was probably the best idea of the ones they had considered because it left each of them wishing she had come up with something better.

"Compromises aren't perfect. It's okay that we're disappointed with it."

"That's why my mom says 'compromise' is a nice word for settling. Instead you've got to make sure you're getting what you want while you're letting the other person believe they're getting what they want."

It was sayings of Helena Wells like that one which had Maddie wondering about the wisdom of what they were doing. Sometimes Christina's mom seemed too clever, too sophisticated for honest-as-the-day-is-long Myka Bering. A long time had elapsed since they had been in love, and Maddie worried that they might have grown into people who weren't in the least compatible, who would meet, exchange a few polite remarks, and have no further interest in seeing each other. It was possible that the woman her mom still mooned about no longer existed. It's not about true love, it's about Michelle, she counseled herself, it's about wishy-washy, Gwen-dependent Michelle. "Remember you're telling your mom that my mom and I are taking you home because we can't bear to say good-bye to each other so soon. You have to sell that we're best friends, Christina," she ended warningly.

Christina patted her mouth as she fake-covered a fake yawn. "Listen and learn."

As the counselors came into the cabin and gave them their phones, Maddie pictured Christina's mom flying from their house to greet her daughter and stopping suddenly at the sight of Myka Bering lifting Christina's suitcase from the back of the Subaru. Helena Wells's hands hovered over her heart in shock as she croaked disbelievingly, "Myka?" And Myka whirled away from the Subaru gracefully, like a deer, and cried just as incredulously, "Helena?" Tears were streaming down their faces as they embraced, and Maddie felt her own eyes begin to well at the reconciliation. She heard Christina enthuse about her new friend Maddie and how they couldn't bear to be separated. She was good, and the tears that threatened at the little movie of their mothers' reunion that Maddie was playing in her head began to trickle down her face as Christina painted days of sharing meals in the dining hall and telling each other their secrets after dark. Maddie surreptitiously flicked the tears away as Christina exclaimed with what sounded like genuine excitement, "Mom, we live in the same city and we didn't know it. We've got all sorts of plans for the school year, and Maddie's mom said she could take me home when camp ends this weekend –"

"Maybe I should speak with Maddie's mother directly, darling."

Despite the panic that surged through Maddie as she heard the request issue from the phone's speaker, a part of her mind - the one that wasn't screaming "No!" - noted how strange it was that Christina could sound so American when her Uncle Charles and her mom sounded so British. "That's going to be a little hard, Mom," Christina said smoothly, the flat "ahm" of "Mom" coming from her so naturally. "Maddie's mom is out of the country on business until just before she's supposed to come get us."

"Really." Dry, disbelieving. "And what business is it that's taking Maddie's mum out of the country?"

Christina's eyes grew big at the question and she mouthed at Maddie "What do I say?"

Maddie sat down on the loveseat next to Christina and leaned toward the phone Christina was holding out to her, the part of her mind screaming "No!" joined by all the other parts, but she was in too deep to panic. She could handle this, she could handle this, she could - "Hi, Ms. Wells, I'm Maddie Martino, Christina's friend. My mom is in Sydney, Australia, visiting a sister school. She's the vice president of external affairs for a university, so she goes on lots of trips out of town." Well, not really, and hardly ever out of the country, but stretching the truth for everyone's greater happiness - that wasn't so horrible, was it?

"Hi, Maddie. Thank you so much for explaining. Do you think if I left your mother a voice mail that she would call me back?" The voice was softer, the skepticism that had colored it when she had been speaking with her daughter absent, and Maddie was instinctively drawn to it, so much so that she was on the verge of saying, "Oh, yes, she's wanted to talk to you for a long time," when Christina yanked back the phone so violently that she nearly fell against the opposite arm of the loveseat.

"Mom, Mrs. Martino's worked it out with the camp counselors. They're going to wait with us until she drives up from the airport. You don't have to believe me, and you don't have to call Maddie's mom in the middle of the night, you can talk to one of them." Christina said it with the perfect combination of exasperation, injured pride, and practicality.

Suddenly there was another voice in the background, rumbling, male, and Maddie heard Christina's mom say, "I'll be with you in a minute, Nate." Then, sounding distracted, she was talking to her daughter again, "I'm running late, darling, for a charity event that Nate is hosting, but I'll definitely want to talk to one of the counselors and Maddie's mom, too, if I can. It's not that I don't trust you, darling, it's just that . . . I don't trust you." Christina didn't seem upset, in fact quite the opposite, she was grinning, and her mom's voice had become even softer than it had been when she spoke to Maddie, and it was loving, especially when she repeated, "I don't trust you."

"Love you too, Mom." Christina sighed and put the phone on the rickety end table. Not two seconds later, there was a rapping on the screen door, and a counselor entered to collect their phones. She was one of the younger counselors, still in college, and she was the one of all of them who was the most willing to let her charges bend the rules.

"Hey, Erin," Christina said lazily, glancing at her as she bent and scooped up their phones and put them in the tote bag she was carrying. "Did I hear you say you were trying to get tickets to Beyoncé's show at the Pfeiffer Center?"

"It's sold out." Erin said with a sense of gloom more appropriate for announcing a death in the family. "Better luck next time, right?"

"Maybe I can do something about that. Let's talk at breakfast tomorrow." Christina was as offhand and as casually dismissive as, well, the senior vice president of a company might be to one of her assistants.

Maddie continued to look blankly at her after Erin had left the cabin. Christina said slowly, deliberately, letting the words fall around Maddie like they were grand pianos plunging out of windows or boulders tumbling off cliffs, "Erin doesn't know it yet, but she's going to tell my mom that your mom squared everything with the counselors about taking me home from camp - right before she left the country for Australia." Despite the scornful slow-motion explanation, which had Maddie staring mutinously at her, a glimmer of admiration flashed in Christina's eyes. "That was nice, saying your mom was a VP of Exterior Affairs or whatever."

"She is," Maddie said, "I didn't make that part up." Suddenly understanding the connection between Erin and Beyoncé tickets, she demanded, "How are you going to get the Beyoncé tickets to bribe her? You're not _that_ good." Maybe it was kind of snide, but Maddie wasn't going to let anyone, especially a girl who couldn't tell the difference between "exterior" and "external" think she could get away with insulting her intelligence.

"I don't have to be," Christina said smugly. "I can score a couple from Nate. His company always has tickets to big shows, and he still thinks he can buy my affection." Smugness gave way to a resigned sigh. "I had been planning to spend those tickets on getting out of our final hike. So this plan of yours better work."

Setting up this reunion between their mothers was becoming more complicated than Maddie had anticipated. Now they were bribing camp counselors, which just seemed wrong. On the other hand, they couldn't have their mothers speaking to each other for the first time in almost 20 years over the phone. Having heard Helena Wells on the phone with her daughter, Maddie no longer feared that she was a vampire or Voldemort or someone you wouldn't want to meet unarmed in a dark alley. She had sounded like a mom, not unlike her own mother.

The next night when Maddie called her mom to ask her if they could give Christina a ride home "because her mom's got this really nasty flu or something," she expected an immediate and unhesitating yes. Because her mom was always giving students caught in the rain a ride home and buying extra groceries to donate to the food shelf and buying cookie dough and magazines from kids fundraising for their sports teams. Her mom liked to help. But this time her mom hesitated and said she wanted to talk to Christina's mom, if at all possible.

"A mother always wants to know where her children are and I don't want to take Christina home from camp without confirming that it's okay with her mom." A pause and then Myka Bering muttered, "The last thing my life needs is a kidnapping charge."

Maddie looked at Christina, who theatrically grabbed at her throat. "That's going to be a little difficult, Mom, because Christina's mom, she has, uh, laryngitis on top of her flu. But, uh, she's contacted the counselors, so they all know what's going on. How about if one of them talks to you?"

Erin demanded two additional tickets to reassure Maddie's mom that taking Christina home would not be risking imprisonment.

The Saturday camp ended was beautiful, sunny, not too humid, with a gentle breeze stirring the curtains at their cabin's windows. It was a good omen, if you took weather as an omen. Maddie wasn't so confident of their plan's success that she could ignore the promise of the day. The final hike hiked - Christina, grabbing at her ankles midway through, made it to the end supported by two other campers - their suitcases packed and promises made to a glowering Erin that the Beyoncé tickets would soon be in the mail, she and Christina waited for her mom to arrive.

Of course when her mom did arrive, she had to do something dorky and call to her through the screen door, "Is my own Bear Grylls ready to go home?" Then she acted even dorkier by hugging her in front of Christina and exclaiming with almost giddy relief, "Nope, still my girl. Your Aunt Tracy kept telling me that when I saw you next, you'd be three inches taller and filling out college applications."

Despite the fact that she couldn't be more embarrassed than if her mom had fallen to her knees in a paroxysm of tears over seeing her "baby" again, Maddie hugged her mother back and pushed up her t-shirt sleeves to show off her biceps. "I got these paddling canoes."

"Impressive," her mom said with the appropriate amount of awe, squeezing Maddie's muscle. She smiled at Christina, who was observing them with mild curiosity from the loveseat. "Hi, I'm Myka. If there's a leaf collection or first place ribbons for swimming that you're dying to bring out, I'm here to admire."

Maddie expected Christina to ignore her mom's overture, which, as usual, had strained too hard to be funny, but, after giving her a questioning look that attempted to plumb the sincerity of her interest, Christina unzipped her backpack and took out a few folded pieces of paper. "I painted pictures of the lake."

Myka carefully unfolded watercolors of the lake at sunset and under a bright summer sun. "These are very good, Christina."

They were good, Maddie had to admit. During most afternoons, the campers had had their choice of drawing, making jewelry, composing "nature" music, and creating scrapbooks of their time at camp. Christina had always chosen to draw, collecting watercolors and a sketchpad and taking them to a picnic table that had been dragged to the grassy margins of the beach. It was the one activity that she had appeared to enjoy. Holding out one of the pictures, her mom was asking Christina what colors she had mixed to capture the tint of the lake and why she had chosen to represent her swimmers and canoers as geometrical shapes . . . and Christina was eating it up, pointing at an effect she had tried for here and one she had tried for there. Maddie's mom was nodding, as intently viewing the watercolor as if she were in front of a painting at a museum. When you had Myka Bering's attention, you had all of it, and Maddie couldn't decide whether she was more pleased that her mom was treating Christina as a person and not just as a kid or jealous that she wasn't the object of all that earnest interest.

Christina carefully returned the pictures to her backpack, and Myka scanned the cabin to make sure they weren't leaving behind anything obviously valuable. She urged them to shrug on their backpacks and get ready to go, and Christina scampered, actually scampered, over to her bags. As her mom picked up the largest of their suitcases and arched an eyebrow at her daughter, demanding, "What's in this? A family of bears? All the rocks from the lakebed? Your favorite camp counselor?", Maddie was struck by how pretty her mother was. She didn't have Helena Wells's dramatic coloring or her wicked smile, but today was both a good hair day and a good wardrobe day for Myka Bering, and that couldn't always be said.

Her hair was up, but her mom had gathered and bound it with more care than usual; sometimes she just twisted it into a rough knot and stuck a pencil through it. Really. While her clothes were summer casual, shorts and a short-sleeved blouse, they were free of the odd drips of paint or wood stain - and sawdust - that were the markers of how she frequently spent her weekends, stripping some 90-odd years' worth of improvements and renovations from their 1920s two-story. "We're giving it back its original luster" her mom would say brightly, and generally right after she had accidentally jammed a splinter of wood under her skin or tapped a hammer too close to her thumb. But today, today she was far too pretty for the likes of Michelle and more than pretty enough for the likes of Helena Wells.

Christina was already at the door, eager to leave camp behind her, and as Maddie and her mom plodded to join her, weighed down by bags and suitcases (somehow Maddie had ended up carrying one of Christina's bags in addition to her own backpack), she impatiently flicked a strand of hair behind her ear. "C'mon, slowpokes, the world's our taxi and the meter's running."

Did Christina even know what a "meter" was? And wasn't Uber replacing taxis? Where did she get such a strange, old-fashioned saying? Maddie turned to her mother for explanation, but Myka had dropped one of the suitcases and was staring at Christina. Not in a "What kind of child are you to be calling me a slowpoke?" kind of way, which Maddie would have expected more from her Grandmother Bering, anyway, but in a way that Maddie couldn't define, except that she recognized it threatened the reunion she and Christina had planned. "You remind me of someone," her mom was saying quietly, too quietly. "What's your mother's -"

"We're going to be late for checkout," Maddie shouted, barreling for the door and practically pushing Christina through it.

"Maddie," her mom said, annoyed, but Maddie had grabbed Christina's hand and was pulling her out of range of that odd, piercing stare.

Disaster narrowly averted, Maddie gulped down air. It wasn't easy running with two bags and yanking along a bewildered Christina. Christina shook her hand loose and gave Maddie an "Are you crazy?" scowl before readjusting her backpack. Checkout, once they made it through checkout, everything would be back on plan, back on schedule. Maddie began to trudge toward one of the older counselors, who was waving good-bye to a group of campers and their parents, but she shook her head as Maddie approached her and pointed to another counselor on the path, Erin. All three conspirators were gathering together, her, Christina, Erin; this did not bode well. If this were one of the old black and white movies her mom liked to watch, one of them would start sweating and cry out, "I can't take it anymore! I gotta tell the truth!"

Yet Erin was the perfect junior counselor, calmly working down a list of questions on her clipboard, which were on the order of "Do you have all of your electronic devices?" and "Did you clear all foodstuffs from the cabin?" Maddie fumed at the duh-ness of it. Like they hadn't been using their electronic devices day _and_ night. Like they hadn't had enough creepy-crawlies in the cabin as it was. After she and Christina had answered all the questions, her mom, being her mom had to express her appreciation for Erin's help in ensuring that Christina had a ride home. "I'm sure the kids learned a lot but probably not enough to survive on their own in the woods," Myka joked (and Maddie rolled her eyes), "so I thank you and I'm sure Christina's mom does too."

"Sure thing, Ms. Bering," Erin said, "I spoke to Ms. W-"

"Bianchi," Christina cut in swiftly, firmly. "My mom prefers Bianchi."

Erin clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and narrowed her eyes at Christina. "I spoke to Ms. Bi-an-chi," she continued, with deliberate emphasis, "and, as I told you earlier, she's absolutely fine with you picking Christina up." She bestowed upon Maddie's mom a smile so sweet that Maddie feared her mom would suspect something was up, because no one ever smiled that sweetly and meant it, but her mom was busy searching her shoulder bag for her car keys and so missed out on Erin's insulin-proof display of teeth. Taking advantage of her distraction, Erin mouthed the words "Four tickets" and flashed four fingers at Christina.

Maddie didn't begin to relax until her mom drove their Subaru past the camp's entrance gates, and she looked through the rear window until the dark green of the forest and the turn-off for the state park, which led straight into the center of the forest, were out of view. Christina, naturally, wasn't burdened by any leftover anxiety from their near-misses, sitting shotgun (how had she managed that?) and chatting with her mom about going to art camp next summer.

The trip back to the city was a long one, so there were stops for lunch and unaccountably, given her mom's position on sugar, for ice cream at a Tasty Treat in one of the endless small towns along the highway. Her mom had even suggested that they could all go to the Post-Impressionism exhibit at the art museum, and Christina, not needing to be prompted by a poke from Maddie, had suggested that her mom might want to go, "as long as she's over her flu and everything." When Maddie impressed upon her mom that she and Christina, having become the best of friends at camp, would want to have sleepovers and after-school study sessions, would, in fact, want to spend "tons and tons of time together" - which had Christina widening her eyes but, thankfully, resisting from pretending to gag at the prospect of such togetherness - her mom said only, "Okay, I guess Christina's mother and I will have to work out a schedule."

Maddie could have hugged her mother then if she hadn't been in the backseat and her mom driving and if she weren't trying to reduce the hugging and other displays of affection, which, since she was entering middle school in the fall, she was getting too old for. She almost didn't feel guilty about the surprise they were about to spring; her mom was falling into step so perfectly with their plan that Maddie might have believed a part of her mom had already divined what they were up to and approved of it. Her uneasiness didn't return until Christina directed them to take a turn north of the city "'cause my mom and I have been pretty much living at her fiancé's lately."

They weren't out in the country anymore, not where there were farms and cows and dogs about as silly as Remy, making the skittish kind of feints that suggested they might hurl themselves into traffic at any minute, but they weren't out in the suburbs either. The houses were big and getting bigger, retreating farther and farther from the road as if it were a source of infection, and the fences and no trespassing signs on them weren't only announcing ownership but imposing a quarantine. Maddie felt that she wasn't an intruder so much as a germ. Her mom seemed to share her discomfort but tried to disguise it with a nervous laugh. "It's lovely here, Christina, but I imagine it's very quiet. Do you like it?"

"I guess." Christina's shrug wasn't the casually dismissive one that Maddie so envied. It was defensive, and it finished by her drawing in her shoulders, as though she were hunching against the cold. "It's straight ahead." She pointed to where the road dead-ended in front of a narrow, albeit well paved, lane. "Follow it until you come to the gates."

"Gates?" Maddie and her mom repeated simultaneously.

"Yup." Christina's mouth was a sour line.

Maddie was expecting the gates to be like the portcullis of a castle or the outer walls of a fort, bristling with sharp points, and she expected that they would block the lane shortly after they turned onto it, but they drove and drove . . . and drove, passing between groves of trees and across a creek, the land either pressing in on them, all woodsy and wild, or sweeping away from them in great flat stretches of grass and summer flowers. Her mom slowed the car down as they approached a rambling stone fence, which in its center had two metal arms, and, set in one of its supports, an electronic sensor with a keypad underneath it.

"It opens by remote, but since we don't have a remote, I'll have to key in the code." Christina hopped out of the car and entered numbers on the keypad. The arms swung open and she flung herself into the backseat where she had been sitting since Maddie had reminded her at the Tasty Treat that "best friends sit together." "Better hurry through," Christina advised, "they don't stay open long."

The Subaru, older and cranky, never liked being rushed, and the arms nearly clipped its rear bumper as they swung closed. At the end of the lane, which was still a distance away, rose a mansion that could have come straight from one of those boring historical dramas on PBS. "Je-" Maddie's mom let the word die before it could become a swear word. She cleared her throat. "Is there a servants' entrance? Because I'm not sure I'd be let in through the front door."

"Nate doesn't have servants," Christina said, missing the joke. "He has a personal chef and a trainer, and there's a cleaning crew that comes once a week," she frowned, thinking, "oh, and there are guys who come and mow the lawn and stuff. But mainly it's just him and Adelaide and me and Mom."

"It's a wonder he can find room for all of you," Maddie's mom said with a disbelieving laugh. She tipped her sunglasses down and looked at Christina. "You said Nate. Your mom's fiancé isn't Nate Robinson, is he?"

Christina vigorously nodded. "Do you know him?"

"Know of him," Maddie's mom said grimly, and Maddie's unease was making her stomach gurgle. They weren't "I'm hungry" gurgles (they couldn't be after a real, non-turkey burger and a double-dip ice cream cone); they were gurgles making her regret the fries that had come with the burger and the second scoop of ice cream.

The lane widened as they neared the mansion, which had rows and rows of windows and light-colored stone. It looked like a pat of butter, Maddie decided, it was big and square and the stone had a creamy, faintly yellow color. On one end of the mansion was an archway and underneath it a sports car. Christina said, "That's my mom's car," and Maddie thought it was the perfect car for the vampirish Helena Wells or the Helena Wells of the wicked little smile. It was black and sleek, and it looked very fast, a poor mate for the Subaru, which was in need of a wash and carried old stickers of Maddie's short-lived athletic career ("Proud Mom of a Soccer Star" and "Go Wildcats!"). However, there was also the Helena Wells who was a mom, so maybe somewhere there was a minivan.

Maddie's mom looked about for somewhere to park, bewildered by the choices available - behind the sports car, in front of what appeared to be a six-car garage, by the fountain that resembled a series of overflowing punch bowls - eventually deciding to park the Subaru in front of the main entrance, which was set back beneath a line of arches. Christina was already out of the car, running along the brick walk and leaping up the shallow steps to the doors. She flung them open with the carelessness with which she had tended to burst into their cabin at camp. "Mom," she was shouting, and her voice sounded, even from outside the mansion, as though she were shouting from deep inside a cavern. Maddie dragged one of Christina's lighter bags from the Subaru. It might look like a mansion, she told herself, but it was just a big, big house, and somewhere in it, Christina's mom was doing the stuff her mom did on a Saturday, folding clothes from the dryer, giving Remy a bath, vacuuming.

Her mom winced when the end of the suitcase she was carrying banged into the door, and then she was too busy examining the panels for damage to marvel at the room she and Maddie were in, which wasn't a room so much as a giant foyer that traveled the length of the mansion. At the far end was another set of doors that let onto a terrace, and they were open, letting the sun warm the stone. A sparkly chandelier hung from the ceiling and stairs swept up to a second floor and a little balcony that overlooked the floor.

"Mom," Christina hollered again. She spun to face Maddie and her mother. "She must be by the pool."

"I thought she had the flu," Maddie's mom said suspiciously, and then more suspiciously, she said, "complicated by laryngitis." She looked hard at Christina, who escaped onto the terrace, and, as if she had to find someone to whom she could give the full measure of her disapproving mom look, she fixed it on Maddie. "I think you better tell me what's really going on," she said with the quietness that Maddie recognized as a sign that she was in trouble.

In the end, however, she didn't have to say anything because a few seconds later, a woman was walking through the ginormous foyer to greet them. Her hair was just as dark as in her picture, swirling, dancing over shoulders that were bare except for the thin straps of her bikini top. The bikini was a deep, rich red, which emphasized the fairness of her skin and brought to Maddie's mind Helena Wells-as-vampire in the photo on Christina's phone, dark and pale . . . and predatory. Involuntarily Maddie gulped.

Christina was leading her mother by the hand, yammering about ice cream and Post-Impressionists and "boring camp." Helena Wells continued to glide toward them, a sarong-like wrap tied around her waist, its thin fabric fluttering around her legs. She was glamorous and a little scary and not very Mom-like at all. Someone old, and old-fashioned, like Grandmother Bering would say Christina's mom had deviltry in her face. The dark curve of her brows and the bow of her lips gave her face a questioning, teasing cast, as if she would always be on the verge of challenging you to best her. The expression softened as her eyes fell on Maddie - for an instant there flashed in them something maternal and strangely tender - and then they were traveling to Maddie's mom and the devil was back in full force. "Myka," she said, and though her tone suggested surprise, her expression didn't, and Maddie wondered if, on some level, Christina's mom wasn't surprised at all to see them.

Glancing at her mom to discover whether she was betraying the same odd mix of surprise and expectation, Maddie realized that her mom's surprise was completely genuine. In fact, her mom's mouth was hanging open and her arms, suddenly free of Christina's bags, were fumbling to cross themselves over her stomach, Helena Wells's appearance seeming to have landed like a fist. "Helena," she wheezed.

Maddie had never seen her mother like this, and part of her was sorry for the tricks that she and Christina had played to get these two here, to this moment. But another part of her was thinking about those old pictures and Michelle and Nate, and while she felt bad for her mom, she didn't feel awful enough to wish that she and Christina hadn't set her plan into motion. It was for their own good, she began repeating to herself, it was for their own good.


	3. Chapter 3

_What Is Your Mother Like?_

 **Myka**

She was going too fast. The Subaru was bucketing down the lane much faster than it should be, and every thump and rattle was a protest. I'm too old for this, it was saying, and you're too old to be having a meltdown. Helena had assured her that the gates would be open, but Myka had visions of airbags inflating and the Subaru's front end crumpling like an accordion because she was going much too fast and the brakes were too worn to stop the car in time . . . the brakes that she had been putting off replacing for the past several weeks. She glanced at Maddie, who had her forehead pressed against the passenger window. It was possible she was cataloguing everything she saw, trees, flowers, a startled rabbit; it was her daughter's tendency as it was her own, but Myka thought that today, at this moment, it was a maneuver to forestall a conversation about how - and why - two 11-year-old girls had apparently orchestrated a reunion between their mothers.

The gates _were_ open. Myka eased up on the accelerator, and the Subaru, with a last ferocious rattle of outrage, glided through. She felt the tension ease from her shoulders, her neck, as the arms swung together, and she continued to slow the car down. Once they turned back onto the highway, she felt even better, and, keeping the speed precisely five miles above the limit, she felt the safety of the metropolitan sprawl envelope her. This she could negotiate. Granted, the other drivers were rude or distracted, the congestion horrible (even on the weekends anymore), and the shopping centers and housing developments on either side as uniform as if they had been taken from a factory conveyor belt, but there were still rules or, at the least, counteracting behaviors that you could adopt. Drive at a sane speed, stay in the right lane, don't be impatient to get to your destination, appreciate the fact that you don't live in the suburbs (although she and Tracy had grown up in an outer ring suburb, so, really, "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"). There had been no rules for the half-hour they had spent in Helena's house, no, not hers, not yet, the half-hour they had spent in Nate Robinson's mansion.

Her first realization that the universe was not operating according to its usual rules was that Helena - and she knew, on some level, she would be processing the fact for days that the woman she had seen and chatted with and whose iced tea she had sipped (her throat had been too tight for more than sips) was Helena - had looked wonderful. Gorgeous, and she would be - Myka didn't have to search for the birth date because she had never forgotten it - 42, yes, 42 on September 21. Women who were less than two months from their 42nd birthday shouldn't still look like they were under 30. Myka knew she didn't, and she was three years younger than Helena. That hair, that skin, that red bikini in combination with that hair, that skin. Myka wanted to squirm, and she wasn't sure how much of it was from frustration that anyone could look that good and how much of it was from frustration that Helena did.

Her second realization was that their meeting after all these years didn't have nearly the impact on Helena as it did on her. She had gaped, she had croaked out Helena's name, she had nearly fallen to the floor, and all the while Helena had maintained the distant friendliness with which she might have greeted a canvasser from the Democratic party, determined to be cordial but convinced that the canvasser had wandered far from her natural territory. I'm sorry, I might even recognize you, but I no longer speak your language. Maddie, with an adroitness that Myka wouldn't have credited her with a mere ten days ago, had volunteered to help Christina unpack so they could make plans for when they next were together. Christina's frown of annoyance had been momentary, and with a hopeful look in Myka's direction, she suggested, "Maybe at the art museum?" before rocketing back toward the stairs, Maddie close behind her. They had thundered up to the second floor, all but one of Christina's bags, her backpack, forgotten where they had been dropped in the hallway. Helena had smiled down at the bags and then turned the smile on Myka, one amused and knowing, probably amused because it was knowing. "They need to work on their subtlety, but not bad." She had tilted her head toward the patio. "Why don't you join me out there, and we can get caught up, just as they're expecting us to do."

In an uncharacteristic bit of recklessness, Myka cut across multiple lanes of traffic, although their exit wasn't for several miles, not until they were well within the city proper. She had felt hemmed in, and in this lane at this moment, now driving ten miles above the speed limit, she felt freer. And slightly dangerous, which might be all right when you were on the freeway by yourself, trying to rid your thoughts of the 30 minutes you had spent exchanging small talk with Helena - the woman with whom you had never once imagined swapping clichés about your lives, your jobs - but which wasn't all right when your daughter was in the car with you casting anxious looks at the speedometer. She was Myka Bering after all, someone who wasn't reckless or (slightly) dangerous, who had summed up the 18 years she and Helena had been apart as perfunctorily and as self-consciously as a first time user of an online dating site: university administrator, divorced mom, DIY enthusiast in her spare time. (She firmly believed that online dating sites should never replace the casual encounter at a bookstore, the ad hoc set-up by friends at a dinner party, since the reward of feeling that instant attraction as your eyes met more than outweighed the crushing social anxiety - and she should know, since the minute she had locked eyes with perennial senior Helena Wells . . . .)

Helena had been more expansive, which was true to the Helena Myka remembered, describing post-graduate years of "poking about in the world's versions of Auntie's attic and a jumble sale, collecting all sorts of odd experiences" before going to work for Charles "in the proverbial mailroom, although, of course, Future Image has no mailroom because it has no mail." She had laughed the old, sardonic laugh Myka remembered. "Email is too old-fashioned, although Charles has been stymied in his pursuit of its successor. I believe he would prefer a window into his mind if he thought we could withstand the glimpses of his magnificence." She skated around the circumstances of Christina's birth, noting roguishly, "In the midst of trying to resolve a messy scandal on the set of an Italian melodrama, I created one of my own with a very handsome, but already spoken for, actor." Then after years of building Future Image's reputation, and cachet, "on this side of the Atlantic, I returned to London only to be banished to the hinterlands." Her smile was easy, her enjoyment in telling her tale obvious, but Myka had sensed her retreating. Maybe it was nothing more than Helena interrupting the course of her narrative to adjust the fit of her wrap or to offer Myka more iced tea, but this part of her life story felt, if it didn't sound, less polished. Myka had received the same impression when Helena spoke about Nate. She spoke of him admiringly, even gushingly, but the scaffolding of her story about how they met was raw, the wood green, the construction amateurish.

"I'm glad you're happy," Myka had said quietly, catching something surprised, even disappointed, in Helena's eyes. She had believed once upon a time that there was nothing that Helena could hide from her, the deep brown of those eyes as transparent to her as if they had been blue. But that had been 18 years ago, 18 lifetimes ago, rather, because that Helena, the one whose down-at-the-heels clothes and carelessly groomed mane of hair Myka could recall in detail, would never have found herself here, holding court poolside in this monument to male vanity. Not without a good dose of self-mockery, but that wouldn't be a prized quality in Nate Robinson's house.

Of course there was no keeping this news from Tracy, although Myka was tempted to exercise those soft skills from the dark side of the Force that were not her strength - dissembling, denying responsibility, lying, manipulating. Helena was a college romance that had ended years ago; other people would have put such an old love away, occasionally bringing it out to blow the dust off, but otherwise not giving it much thought. But not her, not Monster Memory Myka (which had been Sam's sometimes loving but more often sarcastic nickname for her), although that monster memory was puckishly selective. She couldn't remember what Sam had given her for their anniversaries, but she could remember every gift that Helena had given her; every scrap of paper that Helena had written an "I love you" on and then hidden in her backpack or a textbook as a surprise was stored somewhere in her memory. If she couldn't not say anything about seeing Helena again and if she couldn't drop it casually into conversation, then maybe she just should blurt it out - the shock, the disbelief, the dismay - and suffer her sister's endless, and merciless, teasing.

In the end, Myka was left to assume that she had presented a target too large since Tracy had been uncharacteristically restrained, refusing to indulge in the easiest gibes and jokes. Perhaps the fact that Tracy had also invited their mother over for her "welcome home" dinner for Maddie had had something to do with it. Jeannie Bering was a peacemaker by nature, and she had gotten plenty of practice in her marriage to their father, negotiating countless cease-fires between him and his eldest daughter in particular. She could sniff out an unkind remark before it was spoken, putting her hand on the arm of the prospective offender and, gently but inexorably, changing the subject.

That didn't stop Tracy from firing a broadside. "Wow," she said, avoiding the sofa and choosing one of the armchairs in the living room in which to sit down, baby Mulvaney (whose sex remained known only to the obstetrician) between the size of a bowling ball and a beach ball. "What's it been, 20 years or so since you last saw her?" She patted the chair's arms, reassuring herself that they would be there when she needed to get up. Then she smiled, very brightly, at her sister.

Twenty years . . . or so. Tracy was testing her, daring her to correct her down to the number of days. Myka's smile was noticeably dimmer. "A long time," she agreed. Their mother, still at the dining room table with Maddie, who was showing off the crafts she had made at camp (a basket woven from reeds, an acorn and dried berry necklace, bookends made from lake stones glued to blocks of wood), beatified them both with a loving glance that refused to acknowledge the aggression of their smiles.

Tracy's eyes strayed toward Maddie, and her expression changed. Myka looked at her daughter as well, but Maddie had suddenly become absorbed in explaining to her grandmother the proper care and handling of a glue gun. Some girls, she was saying, treated it like a six-shooter, sticking it in the pockets of their shorts and then yanking it out like they were the sheriff facing down a gunslinger at high noon. Some girls who did that ended up gluing their pockets shut. By the arch tone of her daughter's voice, Myka was pretty sure that Christina Wells had been one of those girls. "It must've come as a big surprise that Helena is the mother of Maddie's new best friend." Tracy sounded . . . was it sympathetic? Which earned them another beatifying glance from their mother.

"Mom almost fainted," Maddie helpfully provided. "It was a really big surprise. Really big," she repeated, unhelpfully.

"It was hot today, and I was dehydrated. Plus I run hypoglycemic, you know that, Trace." Myka heard her explanations tumbling over each other. "Once I was able to sit down and drink a glass of iced tea, I was fine."

"I imagine you and Helena had a lot of catching up to do. What has she been doing with herself?" Jeannie was reluctantly allowing Maddie to fasten the acorn and dried berry necklace around her throat.

A lot of catching up to do. Myka looked narrowly at her mother. When she and Sam had divorced, her mother had tried to console her by reminding her that there were a lot of fish in the sea. Not that she believed in labels and not that her social life in high school had given her parents much indication about the seas in which she would be interested in casting her line, so to speak, but she knew that her mother didn't mean fish of all varieties. Her relationship with Helena, her later, not-so-secret trysts with Laurel, the other - engaged - assistant in the provost's office, they had never truly registered with Jeannie. Unsure of how adamantly she wanted to dampen her mother's expectations, Myka had taken her mother's hands in hers and said, "I've tried, Mom, but I'm not really into that kind of fish." When she had started dating Michelle, Jeannie had murmured, "Ah, that's what you meant," but her understanding wasn't retrospective, apparently. Myka wasn't going to bother correcting her mother about Helena tonight. It didn't matter, anyway, what they had been to one another, they were virtually strangers at this point, so maybe "catching up" was the better term.

"She runs a public relations firm with her brother, and she's engaged to marry Nate Robinson."

Jeannie and Tracy exchanged glances, but it was Tracy who thinned her lips, as if readying herself for a fight, and said, "You mean the Nate Robinson who owns a global agribusiness conglomerate? The one who's a stalwart of the Republican party, not the old Republican party, but the new scary Republican party? The one who's almost singlehandedly responsible for the environmental disaster that this state's becoming?"

"The one and the same," Myka said, spreading her hands in an I-can't-believe-it-either gesture.

"Christina doesn't like him," Maddie said solemnly, standing back and appraising how her necklace looked on her grandmother.

"Just because he's taken political positions we don't agree with doesn't make him a bad man." Jeannie tried to sound chiding but failed.

"In this case, it sorta does, Mom," Tracy objected. "The runoff from his plants is killing our rivers and lakes, and he's fought every environmental regulation that the state legislature's tried to pass." She laughed sarcastically. "I could get it if he looked like Chris Hemsworth or The Rock, but he's a middle-aged tycoon who just happens to have a full head of hair." Pinning her gaze on Myka, she said, "I wouldn't have thought Helena was that shallow. It's not like you have to see her again, right?" Tracy gave vent to another sarcastic laugh. "You're hardly traveling in the same social circles."

There was the sound of marbles hitting the floor, and Maddie, who had just freed her grandmother of the necklace, was staring at the broken ends of the leather cord in her hands. Acorns were rolling under the dining room table. "But Mom, you were going to take me and Christina to the art museum, and Christina was thinking of asking her mom to come along," she protested, her complaint threatening to become a wail. "Don't ruin everything!"

 **Helena**

It wasn't that she didn't enjoy a good painting, or several, but there was only so much brilliance she could take in at one time. ("You mean brilliance that's not your own," Charles snidely whispered in her mind.) Myka and Christina were practically nose to canvas with a Van Gogh, or as close as they could get considering that the portrait was ringed off and that a security guard was pacing with purpose only a few feet away. Christina's leaning over the rope marking the protected space had earned her a warning from the guard. Really, one more in the Wheat Fields series hardly seemed to merit the rebuke, let alone her daughter's enthusiasm.

She was a bit of a philistine, she could admit it. She would generally prefer to attend a football match (or watch one on the telly since there were no good matches in the States) than go to an exhibit. Years ago that flash of reverse snobbery had been one of her attractions despite Myka's vehement claims otherwise. More than once Myka had dragged her off to a bedroom (not always their own) after a display of Guinness-fueled cheers, fist pumps, and choice British insults. But that had been many, many years ago, and the Myka with whom she had been recently reunited no longer seemed the type to appreciate British scatological references or a pint of good stout.

Maddie was wandering the gallery, her long, thin legs turning in slightly, her walk a replica of Myka's own somewhat pigeon-toed one. She had her mother's loose-limbed frame and slanting smile as well, although her coloring was different, her hair honey-blond and her eyes a blue a shade or two lighter than . . . than, well, one of the skies in one of these bloody boring paintings. As if she had heard Helena, Maddie spun around, rolling her eyes, hard, in the direction of Myka and Christina. They grinned at each other in perfect synchronization. Edging around the exhibit-goers, Helena tapped Myka on the shoulder. "I thought I'd take Maddie down to the sculpture garden. Is that all right with you?"

Myka was wearing glasses today, a surprisingly smart-looking pair, given what Helena had seen her wear in public when they were in college, oversized lenses encased in thick plastic the color of infected mucus. If she hadn't been so gobsmacked by Myka when she had first seen her, she would have used Myka's choice in eyewear as grounds for never asking her out. Myka's eyes looked a little bloodshot, which only intensified their green. Perhaps she hadn't slept well in anticipation of today? Silly thought, Helena admonished herself, although she had tossed and turned most of the night; she loved arrabiata sauce, but it didn't always agree with her. She knew the difference between heartburn and nerves, however, and it had been heartburn.

Myka glanced at her daughter, who was staring down at her feet as she moved them incrementally in a circle, the gallery a clock and Maddie the hand ticking off the seconds. "Sure. We'll meet up with you later."

"The cafeteria, perhaps?" Helena suggested. "A light lunch and then -"

"Back to the trenches?" Myka was smiling now.

Christina, as if she had just awakened, protested, "Mom, you can't be bored already. After this, there's Fauvism and . . . and the Surrealists and . . . ."

Helena smoothed her daughter's hair with a comforting hand. "I'm not bored, but we have to be careful about monopolizing Myka's and Maddie's time. When Maddie and I come back from the garden, we'll have lunch and then time for one more gallery or two." She emphasized Maddie's name, but Christina's eyes didn't flick over to her "new best friend." In fact, Maddie and Christina had paid surprisingly little attention to each other since they had met in the museum lobby. Helena was reminded of the times when she and Charles were children and, after a particularly fierce session of pushing each other or stealing the other's toys, they would quickly sit down next to each other and pretend they were playing a board game, raising innocent faces to their harried parents when they burst into the room. Best friends, indeed. She looked up to see Myka's eyes warm behind those really quite attractive glasses. They were a bit squarish, the kind Clark Kent might wear if it were 201- rather than 1955, but they lent Myka's nerdishness a doubleness, a suggestion that it was merely a disguise and not something hopelessly inborn. For a moment, Helena's mind wandered, and she imagined Myka tossing her glasses to the side and reaching for her, grabbing her by the lapels of her blouse . . . . She wasn't sure why she was heading in a certain direction with that image, but she needed to turn back from where it was leading her. She was in a crowded gallery with her daughter, her daughter's so-called best friend, and a woman she hadn't seen in 18 years. That wasn't completely true - Myka hadn't seen her in 18 years, but she had seen Myka -

"See you soon," she said, moving away and gesturing for Maddie to follow her. Once in the sculpture garden, Maddie wandered just as aimlessly but with an added uncertainty, approaching a sculpture as if she wanted to touch it and then backing away. Helena showed no such uncertainty, taking a seat on the bottom curve of a poured concrete . . . apostrophe. That was what she would call it because it looked like a giant apostrophe whereas the artist, she was sure, had given it a much more fanciful name.

"You're not supposed to sit there," Maddie gravely advised her.

"I don't see a sign telling me not to," Helena said with a smile that she couldn't expect Maddie to recognize although Maddie's mother would. Helena hadn't known how effective it was until she tried to cajole Myka into doing something transgressive, breaking the law or violating school policy or defying the pitiably narrow definition of what the Bering family considered acceptable behavior. Without that smile, Myka wouldn't have smoked a joint, climbed with her to the roof of the tallest building on campus, or fallen in love with her. At the thought of the last, Helena felt the magical power of her smile fail, and she resorted to patting the space next to her as an inducement to Maddie. "What's the worst that can happen? A security guard will see us and tell us to move."

"It doesn't seem very respectful," Maddie said doubtfully. "I mean, it's art. You don't treat it like furniture."

"What if it isn't art, not completely, anyway, unless we sit on it?" Helena looked up and raised an arm to touch the curve of concrete overhead. "Maybe the artist is inviting us to imagine what sitting on the inside of a wave or a crescent moon is like. Perhaps this is supposed to resemble the shell of a person's ear and we're supposed to imagine what she's hearing." Helena put a hand behind her own ear and closed her eyes, pretending to concentrate. "Come sit down," she intoned in the lowest register her voice could accommodate. "Did you hear it?" But Maddie's serious expression was even more pained, if possible. Helena attempted a higher, and scratchier, register, adopting the broadest accent she could summon. "Come, sit down with me, love. Rest your feet and have a cuppa." That earned her a smile, a disapproving, embarrassed here's-an-adult-making-a-fool-of-herself smile, but a smile all the same, and Maddie sat down beside her.

They were quiet and Helena enjoyed the breeze, the sun, and the faint hum of traffic. The sculptures were the least attractive feature of the sculpture garden, she thought, more than a few of them showing their age, the metal ones inconveniently flaking or rusting and the stone ones discoloring and crumbling at their edges. If they were clients of Future Image, she would advise them to get a makeover, first of all. Despite what nice people like Myka said, appearances mattered. You, asymmetrical column of metal trapezoids, have a thorough rust removal done and get some discreet repair work on those weathered corners. She wasn't yet to the point where she would have to consider a few tucks here and there, but she had recently started coloring her hair. And spend the money, she silently counseled the artworks, the whole point of a makeover is not to look made over. She was spending an atrocious amount of money to have her hair so artfully colored even she couldn't tell the difference between her natural color and the one her stylist created for her. Once people were no longer gawping in dismay at how you looked, you could work on all the other negative things you were signaling. Such as, she directed a glare at a sculpture of interlinked petals cast in ribbony loops last popular in the '70s, trendy catch-phrases outdated upon arrival, "flower power" indeed.

In the midst of her castigation, she remembered Myka turning away from the Van Gogh and it silenced her jeers. The barely tamed hair, which cried out for a stylist with a master plan; the ill-matched aqua polo shirt and forest green twill skirt; the horror of her shoes, which should have been slim sandals with a heel to show off those mile-long legs of hers but were, instead, Teva-like affairs designed for hiking mountain trails, they did nothing to lessen Helena's belief that Myka remained one of the most attractive women she had ever met.

"If you and my mom were, um, good friends, why has it been so long since you two talked?" Maddie had been looking nervously for a guard to materialize and order them off the sculpture, twisting and craning her neck, but she had straightened her slumped shoulders and was seriously, intently regarding her.

Too seriously. Definitely Myka's child. Maddie eyes might be blue instead of green but they were no less capable of seeing through all her many prevarications. But they were only prevarications if Helena knew what the truth was, and she didn't. She had known many things in her 20s that she had since been forced to unlearn, one of them being that bigger and better things were always around the corner. Sometimes they were right in front of you instead . . . . "An argument," Helena said finally. "It seemed important at the time but not so much now."

"You had a fight? And it's lasted longer than I've been alive?" Maddie asked incredulously.

"It's not as though we're still fighting," Helena said chidingly. Although wasn't this nearly 20-year silence of theirs the equivalent of each threatening to hold her breath until the other gave in? "We were young, and when you're young, things have a way of appearing larger than they are, and later . . . . Later, we were living different lives, and sometimes it's harder than it should be to ignore the years and the miles between you." Vague, puffy excuses, no wonder Maddie continued to look dissatisfied. Your mother's dreams were so concrete and detailed, whereas mine were hazy and evanescent. Your mother always had plans, always tended to flatten the world into a narrative in which she could identify the beginning and the end. No matter how the narrative would begin, it would always end the same way, Bering and Wells forever. I didn't want to read the world, I wanted to immerse myself in it. I didn't want an "end."

Helena smiled more to herself than at Maddie. As it turned out, Myka's view was closer to the truth, the world's wonders turning out to be limited and well-worn, but Maddie had the right to spout her own romantic nonsense and then cringe at the memory of it decades later. As Maddie continued to look at her inquiringly, Helena tipped her head toward the sculpture garden's exit. "Shall we see what the cafeteria is offering for lunch?" Her 24-year-old self had been a silly twit, but she wouldn't tell Maddie that either.

 **Myka and Helena**

After lunch, they had breezed through an exhibit of Annie Leibowitz photographs and passed through galleries housing art from the first 50 years of the 20th century with second looks only for Picasso and Pollock. The girls had decided they could forego the last 60-plus years and its various movements in favor of time spent in the museum's gift shop. Myka and Helena had gratefully assented, and though Myka didn't share in Michelle's outraged conviction that gift shops were yet another portent of the capitalist apocalypse, in which there would be no moment of existence that wasn't stamped with a bar code, she also had no desire to spend $15 on a mug displaying Mona Lisa with a broad grin and holding a coffee cup with the caption, "What if you were painted before you had your morning coffee?" Not that Rembrandt or Rubens wouldn't be down here hawking everything from t-shirts to golf umbrellas screenprinted with their art, but there was something contrary to the purpose of having visited a museum when you were deciding which would give you the better bang for your buck, a mouse pad with some version of Monet's _Water Lilies_ or a pen with Klimt's _The Kiss_ wrapped around its barrel. She put down the pen and confirmed with a sigh that Christina and Maddie were still flipping through the posters.

Helena was absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in a coffee table book of early Renaissance paintings. Occasionally she would flick strands of that hair, that hair, that hair, as black and inviting to the touch as . . . licorice . . . behind a shoulder, and Myka was once again struck by the unfairness that Helena should look, not as good as, but even better than the Helena of 18 years ago. Wearing slacks that hugged her hips better than skinny jeans, sandals with virtually stiletto heels, and a linen shirt unwilted by the heat, she was - she was beautiful. Myka couldn't help but look down at her sensible twill skirt and comfortable walking sandals and think she should have listened to Maddie, who had urged her to dress up. But it wasn't a date, it wasn't two old friends reconnecting as they enjoyed a few hundred masterpieces, it was two moms dragged along on their daughters' play date. Nothing to primp for, nothing to chew a thumbnail down to the quick in indecision about what would look best on her. After today, she might occasionally drop Maddie off at Nate's or whatever glossy-looking condo Helena lived in and nod in greeting through the car window and Helena might wave as she dropped off Christina, but there would be no resumption of -

"I think Christina has finally finished decorating her wall." Helena had put down the book and was walking toward her, gesturing toward their daughters. Christina's arms were full of rolled posters that she and Maddie had pulled from their numbered slots underneath the display. She spread her index and middle fingers in a vee and flashed them at Christina. "Two," she said, so there would be no mistake.

As Christina, with a loud huff of disappointment, turned back to the display, Helena noticed that Maddie held nothing - no posters, no box of notecards, no cleverly designed and inordinately expensive trinket. Of course she wouldn't; the Bering household would be one in which the value of an experience would be enshrined in the experience itself. If Myka or Maddie needed to relive the moment, she would rely on her memory of it, needing no snow globe or baseball cap to bring it to mind, "souvenir" for her solely the act of remembering. The Wellses, by contrast, would buy the entire store - Myka would expect no more of her. Helena hadn't forgotten the disbelief in Myka's eyes as she tried to fit the girl she had known with the mansion she found the woman living in, the Helena of 18 years ago with her disregard for all that money could buy (apart from a plane ticket to the next best place and a bag of weed), a different being entirely from the spa-toned chatelaine of a Midwestern palazzo. She also hadn't forgotten the moue Myka had failed to hide, after she had finished glossing over, rather amusingly she thought, the changes 18 years had brought and come to her engagement to Nate. It was as though she had announced her engagement to Pizarro or Cortes, taking a proprietary pride in his subjugation of native civilizations. It was one thing to be thought a philistine, another to be thought a genocidal despoiler.

"I like Christina," Myka said. Helena started, tracking Myka's gaze and finding it focused on her daughter. "I enjoyed going through the galleries with her. She has a lively mind."

"You should see how lively she is about inventing reasons for not doing her homework. If she were to put all that energy toward her classes, she'd have straight A's." Helena realized she sounded like a disgruntled middle-class mother worried that her child wasn't working hard enough to earn a scholarship, when, naturally, Nate, as Christina's future stepfather, would simply endow her way into the school of her choice. Wasn't that what Myka was thinking?

Then the wry smile appeared, the one Helena used to trace with her fingertips, the lips pulling up diagonally, as if Myka didn't quite trust her initial response, couldn't fully allow the line of her mouth to relax. There was always a rain cloud threatening the sun, a lump of coal waiting to be found at the bottom of a Christmas stocking; disappointment always attended joy. "Reminds me of someone I knew," she said quietly.

"'Showing up is half the grade,'" Helena said, laughing softly, lightly, "that's what you used to tell me."

"When I'd come back from class and find you listening to CDs or watching soap operas," Myka reminded her in mock admonishment.

"Sometimes you were responsible for me failing to show up for an exam, remember?" Helena's tone was teasing, but her eyes suddenly seemed enormous and Myka thought she might lose herself in them if she didn't look away.

"Okay, Mom, I have my _two_ ," Christina said with aggrieved emphasis, holding her posters out to Helena. "How am I going to learn if I have only two?"

The eyes closed and then very slowly started to open, presenting an irritated, albeit thickly lashed, line directed at her daughter. "Don't make me reduce it to one," Helena warned her.

The posters purchased, they left the gift shop and drifted toward the museum's entrance, conversation trailing off as each realized the outing was coming to an end. Separate cars, separate routes home, separate lives. Already Maddie and Myka were drawing away from Helena and Christina. They had had to check bags and umbrellas (there had been a 40% chance of rain in the forecast when Myka had checked that morning) in the coat room. "I think we'll leave you here," Helena said, too breezily. "Nate's due back today after three weeks of inspecting farms in southeast Asia, so - "

"You'll want to get things ready to welcome him home," Myka said, her smile no longer endearingly slanted but horizontal, too wide, in fact, a little too obliging.

"This was a wonderful suggestion, Myka. I'm so glad we had another opportunity to reconnect." Helena wanted to stop herself, but she couldn't. She sounded like she did when she was walking a no-longer-prospective client out of her office: genial, appreciative, but unshakably convinced that "this one" was not for them. She didn't want the afternoon to end like this, but she didn't know how to bridge an 18-year divide with a 9-month love affair. That was all they had had. She was a businesswoman - a successful one - she was engaged to be married; she was no longer the ne'er-do-well Wells, the one who preferred to slam back a pint or two than complete assignments, who skipped classes and failed courses, who proposed a summer of vagabonding through Spain to the nerdiest, most delicious girl she had ever met. She was someone else now.

And Myka understood, she felt the same, Helena could see it in her face, hear it in her voice. "Over the years, I'd wonder what had become of you, wonder if you were happy." Myka held up her arms and dropped them. "I have my answer. You look great, you look happy. It was so good to spend time together like this."

 **Maddie**

It had been going to end like that, with the both of them saying all those "so nice to see you again" things that even she knew, at just 11, no one really meant. Her feet hurt from standing on the unaccommodating marble floors, her head ached from the overload of color and imagery and ideas, her stomach complained at the burden of the chicken quesadillas she had eaten for lunch. She had been ready for a victory nap after spending the past few hours closely observing her mom and Helena because, while their exchanges might have been stilted and tentative, the glances they had darted at each other all afternoon had expressed the interest and curiosity that their words hadn't. Maddie noticed how her mom's eyes had widened when they met the Wellses at the museum's main entrance, Helena's hair lifting in the breeze and then falling in charming disarray over her shoulders, the slim body multiplied in the bank of glass doors, the wicked smile, as they approached, making of their visiting a museum a daring escapade. Seeing that smile, Maddie wouldn't have been surprised had Helena said, "The alarms have been turned off and the guards locked in the basement. Grab as much art as you can and then let's fly." She hadn't said anything like that, naturally. Instead she had said, "Lovely day, isn't it? The kind you'd like to paint if you could."

Her mom had taken off her sunglasses and was poking the temple pieces into her hair, apparently trying to rest the glasses on her head, but she kept poking and making her hair messier, and all the while she wore the same dumbstruck, walked-into-a-wall expression that had glazed over her face when she had seen Helena coming in from the pool. Helena had simply been slyer about revealing how fascinated she was. Maddie couldn't miss how often Helena's eyes had strayed toward her mother as they strolled through the galleries. They started, unpromisingly, with Myka's feet - Maddie had thought when her mother put the sandals on that they were exactly the wrong ones to wear to this place, with that skirt, in front of this woman - and Helena would imperceptibly shake her head to rid herself of the image. Then the eyes would move up and fix on Myka's legs. Maddie's dad had sometimes told her mom, "I fell in love with your legs before I fell in love with you" in happier times. Maddie could hardly remember those times, and, though it was weird and a sign that she was way overinvested in a relationship that had ended (supposedly) years before she was born, she didn't find it difficult to imagine Helena whispering that to her mom in one of the galleries.

And maybe there would be a time for that actually to happen - if she did something now. Because she liked Helena or, at least, was open to liking her. She had to admire someone who casually sat on a sculpture and claimed there was no sign that said she couldn't when, in fact, there was a sign right where they had entered the sculpture garden that said "Please do not sit or climb on art." Helena didn't break rules, Maddie thought, she pretended they didn't exist, which was cooler. Michelle talked a lot about breaking rules, but there had to be meetings and proclamations and banners. It didn't involve grinning and adopting old lady voices, really bad old lady voices. Helena might be a hundred times cooler than her mom, but she was also, down deep, a dork. It was possible that Helena and her mom really were meant for each other, but if they left the museum without saying something more than their "so nice's" and "so good's," they would never know, she would never know.

Loudly, she said, "Christina, did you talk to your mom about the pool party?" She had been too loud, her desperate question sounding even more desperate echoing off the marble columns. A security guard frowned at her.

Christina had been holding her rolled-up posters like light sabers, drawing them across her body in sweeping arcs. "Uh, wha-?"

Did she always have to carry the load? "What we were talking about earlier," Maddie answered with forced patience, "hanging out at Nate's pool with your friends and my friends." Friend, singular, limited to Sophie.

"Oh, yeah," Christina said with a sheepishness that sounded perfectly sincere. She turned to her mother. "Next weekend, Mom, would that be okay? And if Nate could get the pool guys to clean it before then, even better."

Maddie stared at her with grudging respect. She almost believed that Christina had forgotten to mention the party, and the party hadn't existed, even in concept, a few seconds ago. There was no grudging respect in Helena's expression, only disbelief. She smiled a smile so thin that Maddie imagined it leaving its recipient with a thousand tiny cuts, small and incredibly painful like paper cuts, and she shuddered at the thought that such a smile might ever possibly be turned on her. Helena's vampire smile seemed friendly in comparison. "First, it's not our pool, it's Nate's. Second, he and I will be in New York next weekend while you'll be staying with Gigi. Third, which brings me back to my first point, you don't get to set the pool cleaning schedule."

Maddie observed that her mom was biting her bottom lip in an effort not to laugh. Christina shrugged. "The weekend after, then? That would be enough time for the pool guys to come out and clean the pool, don't you think?"

Helena groaned, finally saying, "We'll talk more about this when we get home. But you're not selling me on the prospect of spending a Saturday afternoon chaperoning a gaggle of middle-schoolers doing cannonballs into the pool."

Myka offered a little shrug of her own and a slanted smile. "I'll help chaperone, if that's an inducement."

 **Christina**

Her mom was going on and on about being considerate and respectful and a lot of other things she should be doing that ended in -ful. Her mom was acting like she had said no, but there was going to be a pool party. Christina didn't know why Maddie's mom had volunteered to help out, but as her mom was saying all that stuff about it being Nate's pool, Maddie's mom had gotten a look on her face as if she hadn't known Helena Wells was such a riot.

She had enjoyed the museum a lot more this time around. Before, when it had been just her and her mom, her mom had gotten bored and restless and tried to sneak calls on her phone, although she always got called out by the guards. Myka studied the paintings with her, like she was just as interested in trying to figure out how the artist had achieved a certain effect. She asked questions too, sometimes too many, like Maddie: Why the Post-Impressionists? What painting would you take home? Which artist would you like to have met? But Myka seemed to want to hear her answers.

"I like Myka," she said suddenly. She adored Gigi, but if it had been her and Gigi at the museum, Gigi would have been bored and restless like her mom, except she would have been busy scoping out all the other museum-goers she thought were hot. For the first time, her Uncle Charles's comparison of her mom and Gigi to two piranhas in a fishbowl truly made sense. "I like Myka," she repeated. Her mom stopped midstream, something about not taking whatever, whatever, whatever for granted. Then, just to be clear because sometimes her mom was kind of slow about picking up on things, Christina said, "I like Myka. I don't like Nate."

Message delivered. She closed her eyes, slumping in the seat and letting her mom drone on. It was a long drive back to Nate's house. She recalled the still lifes she had seen and imagined how she might compose one. She really wasn't into vegetables or fruit, so she would have to come up with other stuff to put in a fancy bowl, maybe a yogurt parfait, she liked those . . . .


	4. Chapter 4

_Stay The Way You Are (A Nice, Reliable, Settled, Comfortable Woman) - Part One_

 **Helena**

Helena had brought up Christina's idea for a pool party over dinner, and Nate, always indulgent when it came to Christina's whims, reacted no differently to this one, not only agreeing to it but also suggesting that they have the pool cleaned in preparation for it. She wanted to tell him then as she had a million times before that as hard as he worked to make Christina like him, the more Christina disliked him. Helena thought the dislike unfounded and based mainly on her daughter's resentment that it was Nate and not Gigi to whom she was engaged, but she had been unsuccessful in making Christina acknowledge that Nate had any good qualities other than an "awesome pool," and when Helena had pointed out to her that a pool was a possession and not a quality, Christina had imperturbably replied, "That was the only one I could think of, so now he's down to zero good qualities," and put back in the one earbud she had removed to listen to her mother.

She pushed at the halibut on her plate, imagining Myka with those damnably attractive Clark Kent glasses crying out at the further despoliation of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Nate, with a native Midwesterner's suspicion of any finned creature that wasn't a lake-bred fish, was finishing his steak. "You're indulging her," she murmured.

"It's not like I'm going to be there to use it. I have that trip to Brazil next week," he said, popping the last bite of steak into his mouth. "You said you were thinking of coming with me."

"I have clients I've been neglecting, and now that the pool party is on my list of things to do, I should get the house as well as the pool ready."

"That's what I have a cleaning staff for. You can fly out with me on Tuesday and come back on Friday night."

She shook her head, but he didn't try to press her further, only shrugging and taking a sip of his wine, nodding at other diners he knew as he let his eyes rove the room. She and Christina had more or less moved into his place at the beginning of June when school had ended, and in the two months since then, she had seen him barely a quarter of the time. She had had hopes that their moving in with him and Adelaide might move along their wedding plans, which were only vaguely coalescing around a spring wedding "next year." It wasn't that she couldn't wait to become Mrs. Nate Robinson, but she and Nate had been engaged for six months and in a relationship for over a year. It was time. She hadn't expected to be sitting across from this man in a New York restaurant which had a waiting list that extended months for ordinary mortals and wearing his ring - she had had far different expectations three years ago when she had managed to wear Charles down into accepting her idea that a Future Image office in the larger Midwest that existed outside Chicago made sense - but it was where she had ended up. There were certainly worse fates and worse men, regardless of what Christina thought.

She had possibly filed down the rough edges a bit when she had described to Myka how she and Nate had met, laughingly characterizing their first meeting as a collision between a "hard-headed businessman and a woman who represented what was 'mere puffery' to him, only sparks could fly from that." No sparks had flown on either side, and it had hardly been a collision either. In fact, their first meeting had been very much a business meeting, and some 13 months later, Helena couldn't entirely shake the feeling that their relationship was, to some extent, an extended business meeting, with benefits. But even those were somewhat lacking . . . .

"There's Bill McDermott, hon, smile and give him a wave," Nate encouraged her, smiling and waving at a portly man leaving the restaurant with a woman 25 years younger. Stretching her lips into a smile that matched Nate's, Helena waved and, taking a closer look at the woman, added ten years to her age. Watching them disappear toward the entrance, Nate said softly, "Rumor has it that he's looking to sell his shipping firm."

"I thought you wanted to concentrate on your core business," Helena said wryly, allowing the waiter who discreetly approached their table to take her plate.

"My core business is making money," he joked, "and if I can cut out the middleman and ship my fertilizer and ethanol myself . . . that's a cost savings." With an inquiring look at Helena, who gave him another a shake of her head, he told their waiter, "No dessert, just the check, please."

They would be going back to their hotel. Nate hadn't gotten out of his last meeting until after 7:00, and they would be meeting another couple, the husband the manager of a hedge fund in which Nate was an investor and the wife an attorney for a law firm that Nate kept on retainer, for brunch and a round of golf tomorrow morning. So much for a romantic weekend getaway. To be fair to Nate, he hadn't pitched it to her that way, he had explained that most of the time he would be involved in meetings or attending dinners or other social events that were, essentially, offsite business meetings, but she had wanted the two of them to carve out a little time for themselves, never more so than after her museum "date" with Myka and Maddie.

The deliberate recollection of Myka in her in teal polo shirt and forest green twill skirt, finished off with Neanderthal-era footwear (those sandals made anyone's feet, even Myka's, look as wide and flat as the Flintstones') did little to offset her memory of those eyes with their strangely charming combination of uncertainty and amusement. Clark Kent always had Lois Lane's number, even at his most bumbling. When she wasn't remembering how Myka looked or moved or sounded, she was imagining how Myka might look, might move in a swimsuit. Granted, Myka was almost 20 years older than when Helena had first seen her . . . unencumbered . . . of most of her clothing, but she still looked fit, fitter now perhaps than back then when they were stuffing themselves with midnight deliveries of pizza and wings or Sunday brunch cinnamon rolls. Myka had protested at the excess frosting on the rolls, but she had come up with a more satisfactory disposal method, scooping it up with her finger and then holding her finger a millimeter from –

Helena choked on the wine she was trying to swallow and tested the temperature of the bath, batting away bubbles until she could dabble her fingertips in the water. She might prefer to be dabbling them in icing given the choice, but though she had tried to coax Nate into taking a bubble bath with her or doing something, anything other than opening his laptop and reading the email that had piled up in his inbox during dinner, he had regretfully but firmly declined. She could read her email too; in fact, she probably should. There was a reality TV star whose recently posted rap sheet was thwarting his attempts to translate his smirking appearance on a dating show into an acting career, and he had been pleading with her daily to "MAKE THIS GO AWAY." But this was their time together, her and Nate's, not her and Myka's rewarmed and revisited, and certainly not her and Aaron Bradley's, he with his disdainful pout, which, while it might drive mere girls into raptures - and had during the most recent season of _Put a Ring on It_ \- left her feeling both impatient and not a little old.

With more dejection than the moment really merited, she took off her robe and slid into the bathtub, leaving her wine glass within easy reach. A few minutes later, or maybe it was closer to 20, she wasn't sure, except that the level of wine in her glass had been substantially reduced, there was a soft knock on the door. Nate sheepishly, apologetically entered. "I'm a class A idiot. I have a beautiful fiancée who wants to enjoy a romantic bubble bath with me, and I say, 'No thanks, honey, I'd rather read a bunch of reports that can wait until tomorrow.' Still willing to share those bubbles with me?"

Her night got much better after that, but not so good that it completely drove from her mind the image of green eyes behind Clark Kent glasses.

 **Christina**

If Gigi were a color, she would be silver. Not because she was old (although Christina had heard Uncle Charles murmur to her mother more than once, "She's like Melisandre. When she thinks she's alone, off comes the jewelry and she ages a hundred years") and not because she was hard or cold like metal (Gigi was super nice, at least to her) but because silver reflected everything and showed nothing of itself. If you were wearing a red shirt and blue pants and standing next to a silvery piece of metal, that's what you would see - red and blue. Gigi kind of operated like that. Whenever her mom had her stay with Gigi, she was always "What do you want to do, Christina?" And they would do it - the art museum, movies, parks, the mall, whatever. It was kind of mean, Christina admitted to herself, but just to test her, she had asked Gigi one time if they could go horseback riding. She had no interest in horses, and she guessed that Gigi, who liked her comforts and wasn't afraid to say so, had no interest in sitting in a saddle and jouncing around either, but after a long pause, Gigi took in a breath and said, "Sure we can. I'll check into some riding stables."

So they had gone and all she had gotten from it was a sore butt from the jouncing around, but Gigi had gotten two dates, one with their instructor, who wore a cowboy hat and bragged to Gigi about the rodeos he had been in, and one with a woman who didn't like horses but was there because someone had given her the lesson as a birthday present. Christina had found her as annoying as the instructor because she kept referring to Gigi as "your mother" although they looked nothing alike. Gigi didn't want either date particularly, but that sort of thing tended to happen to her. But dates you didn't want were better than a sore butt, and Gigi didn't even have that. The next day she could barely walk while Gigi was running around everywhere.

It was hard to put your finger on Gigi because she was never under it when you looked. She was always somewhere else. Gigi was . . . elusive. It was a good word. (Maddie would tell her to use it three times right away so she would remember it, but it was her philosophy that if she needed to use the word again, it would be there.) Elusive silver. She liked the way it sounded; it could be the title of a picture. Actually, Gigi looked silvery. Her hair was a silvery blond where it wasn't streaked darker blond or even brown; "frosted blond" was how Gigi described it. "You've changed hair color so many times, it's frozen in indecision," Christina had heard her mother say. Gigi had laughed, firing back, "At least my hair isn't Maleficent black." Gigi's eyes were light, too, her irises such a pale blue that they seemed transparent. "The color of London rain," Gigi had said, and her mom had dryly countered with "More like acid rain."

Gigi was in "image consulting," too, although she had only one client, the mayor. Not long after they had moved to the Midwest from New York, her mom had met Gigi "while trying to steal the mayor." That's what Gigi had called it. "I offered him the resources and expertise of a firm known in the field." That's what her mom had called it. Gigi was the mayor's spokesperson, but whenever she was called that, on TV or in the newspapers, her mom would roll her eyes and mutter "Just like Rasputin was only the Romanovs' spiritual advisor." Christina didn't have to know who Rasputin or the Romanovs were to know her mom wasn't being complimentary, and yet, weirdly, she was. "Nothing clings to him," her mother had groused admiringly one morning when they were eating breakfast. She flipped the newspaper over but not before Christina had glimpsed the mayor's picture and partial headline . . . "Charges Dropped."

Gigi made other people elusive. Gigi was . . . stealthy. That was another good word Christina had learned a long time ago. She looked up from her sketch pad. All she could see of Gigi was two feet with impeccably painted toenails crossed on a sofa arm. The rest of her was lost somewhere among the biggest, deepest, plushest cushions Christina had ever seen. The only evidence of Gigi for the past half-hour or so had been her feet and her voice, which, like the rest of her, was silvery, too. Laughing and fleeting and bright. She was talking to the mayor or one of the mayor's team. Christina could tell the difference because Gigi's voice became very smooth, like silver syrup or silver butter, when she talked to the mayor. Her voice would carry away anything that might cling to him. It wasn't butter or syrup now. It sounded sort of clipped, like she was annoyed.

The call ended and then Gigi was up, passing the table and ruffling Christina's hair as she entered the kitchen. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a box of microwave popcorn. "I need a break. How about you?"

They needed an ally, she and Maddie. They needed someone stealthy, someone who could make them elusive, because while she was no slouch when it came to . . . arranging . . . things, they were up against her mom. "Gigi, I need your help."

At first, it hadn't been very promising. When she had asked Gigi if she could keep a secret, Gigi had gotten a "mom" face and said, "Not if it's something your mother needs to know." Then when she had said that it was Nate and not wanting to live with him in that . . . mausoleum (she wasn't quite sure what it meant but she knew it wasn't good) . . . Gigi's eyes had gotten wide and alarmed, and she had had to reassure her that Nate wasn't a perv just boring (and not worthy of her mom, but Christina wasn't going to get into that). It had gotten a little better when she got to the camp part and meeting Maddie, but Gigi still hadn't looked very enthusiastic. It wasn't until she tried to explain her mom and Myka's history and the magic words had popped out -

"Maddie says our moms were, like, crazy about each other, 'gooey-eyed,' she said, and –"

"'Gooey-eyed?' Helena Wells?'" Gigi exclaimed. Christina had the bag of popcorn; Gigi had ten kernels at most in a tiny little bowl, carefully chewing one kernel at a time. "I'm not promising anything," she said finally, "but I want to hear more about this woman who left your mother gooey-eyed. Myka? Is that her name?"

 **Helena**

It was 11:00 on a Saturday morning, and normally she would be at work in Future Image's suite in one of the newer business towers downtown. Nate would be out of the country or unresistingly hemmed in by monitors and stacks of documents in his home office, and as inaccessible in his office as if he were out of the country. Her daughter would be on her phone texting with friends or sketching in a quiet corner, or, more rarely now that she was older and uninterested in accompanying her mother anywhere, pretending to be Future Image's nonexistent receptionist in the suite's waiting area, which had exactly one chair, one accent table, and a coat tree. (Making a client wait might make him question just how important he was to the company, and Helena didn't want her clients to think for a minute that they were any less important to her than they were to themselves - even if it were true.)

But this was not a normal Saturday, this was the Saturday of the pool party, and in two hours Nate's patio and pool would be filled with Christina's friends and many of their parents. Although both the patio and pool were oversized, just like the house, they weren't large enough, Helena feared, to accommodate everyone who was coming. The chaperones would likely outnumber the children, and all but two of them were probably coming to gawk at what they assumed would be a palace. Nate Robinson might be a native son, but he had long ago left the cornfields and one-stoplight towns. He was as stateless as any movie star or pro athlete; his friends were businessmen from all over the world, and he vacationed as easily and effortlessly in Italy or Fiji as he did "up north" at his lake home. Or so the parents of Christina's friends would think, who, while not titans of industry necessarily, were above the median in whatever economic index one might choose. The two who wouldn't be interested, or primarily interested, in the lifestyle of the CEO of an agribusiness giant - one of them was standing next to her, surveying, as she was, the rented patio tables and umbrellas and the two banquet tables, already set up on the patio, that would be bowing under the weight of the catered finger food due to arrive shortly before the first of the awestruck. The parents would park their cars on the square of lawn willingly sacrificed by Nate for the purpose and tilt their heads back like the tops of so many Pez dispensers or ceaselessly move them from side to side like bobbleheads -

"What are you serving them?"

It would have been an unremarkable question coming from someone who actually ate. But Helena knew this woman, she had spent the night with her, several nights, in fact; more importantly she had eaten breakfast with this woman after having spent the night with her. She knew that Gigi considered it a big breakfast if she had yogurt (always plain) _and_ a hard-boiled egg. Gigi maintained that at "their" age oxygen counted as a carbohydrate, and she chose breathing over eating. While Helena always countered that they shared an age only if one considered an age to span decades, à la the Victorian Age, she couldn't deny that Gigi, whatever her birth date, was an exceptionally lovely woman. Though Myka's charm, a strangely heady mix of keen intelligence and social awkwardness, elevated her into a class by herself, Helena would readily admit that it was just her personal opinion; others with more objective points of view would probably hold that Myka was perfectly lovely as normal human beings went and certainly a cut above the ordinary run of university administrators but that Gigi was a former model no matter what she claimed was her occupation. The plain yogurt and coffee breakfast, the ten kernels of popcorn (Helena had seen her count them out), it was unclear how Gigi survived on them, but her figure was still a figure, with all the curves that the common understanding of the word implied. It was magnificently set off this morning by a navy blue bikini, which was barely hidden by the caftan she wore over it, its filminess more an act of provocation than modesty.

Helena thought that she would never be entirely inured to Gigi's appearance, but since she would have to be dead to achieve that blessed state, she allowed herself a tiny, virtually noiseless sigh of regret every time she saw Gigi in a bikini or an evening gown or a . . . gunnysack. The sigh completed, she then responded to her as she would any friend or, in Gigi's case, any former lover from whom she had parted on amicable terms. Lovers, friends, they were often one before they became the other, and, thus, her desire to transition from one phase of their relationship to another with no fuss, no tears. The anomaly, the outlier, her signal failure in that regard had been Myka. "Mini-meatballs, mini-cheeseburgers, mini-corn dogs, wings, onion rings, brownies," Helena began to recite, distracted more by how sharp that failure with Myka could still feel than by her first sight of Gigi in her bikini.

"Everything that kids will love and their parents will hate."

"Breezily spoken by someone who's never known what it's like to coax or scam her child into eating her vegetables," Helena said dryly.

"There's time yet for me to learn," Gigi said.

Her ovaries had to be shrinking in fright at the possibility, unless she was intending to delegate conception. From the top of her head to the tips of her pedicured toes, there was nothing about Gigi that cried out for motherhood. Instead, everything about her cried out that her mornings were meant to be devoted to putting her look together for the day, not making sure that her child got to school on time. Her hair had been gathered into an intricate up-do - she had a stylist on call, she had joked more than once, but Helena was confident that it was true - and her make-up was both perfectly chosen (for a day spent outside and within splashing distance of water) and, as always, perfectly applied. Christina could more or less feed herself now, as long as there was someone to remove the silverware before she turned on the microwave, and, if one considered vegetarian pizza a vegetable, she could even be said to eat from all five food groups on occasion. But there had been times . . . Christina's high chair, the walls, the table, her face, her hair, and her own face and hair, Helena remembered, covered in milk or tomato sauce or both. "You do know that children are not as easily or as quickly housebroken as puppies, don't you?"

Gigi stuck out her tongue. Helena ignored the challenge. In times past, she would have responded differently, and she issued another tiny, noiseless sigh of regret before returning to her survey of the terrace. Soon one half of the banquet tables would be covered by chafing dishes, and the other half would be covered by equally kid-friendly beverages: Gatorade, soda, juice, flavored water. There would be "virgin" mimosas and margaritas, among other nonalcoholic drinks for the adults. The former would be carbonated orange juice and the latter Slurpees in various fruit flavors, but it all sounded better with "virgin" in front of it. It wasn't a matter of changing or denying reality - that was beyond her powers, anyway - it was more often a matter of dressing it up a bit. As she often told her clients, "We're not gilding the lily, darling, we're just spraying some body glitter on it."

"Christina told me about her friend from camp. She said that you know Maddie's mother from college?"

Gigi hadn't bothered to frame it as an innocent question. All the archness that a mayor's spokesperson could muster, which was a considerable amount, was in that upward twist of her lips.

"Quit smirking," Helena said. "If you must know, Myka and I had a brief relationship in college." A part of her knew she should stop there, but another part urged her on, the part that couldn't stand to be smirked at. "It was very sweet, and intense, but over long ago." If anything, the sardonic curl of Gigi's lips grew deeper. "For heaven's sake, if I had to spend precious time remembering everyone I slept with during my inordinately long collegiate career . . . . There is not a server farm anywhere big enough to hold that information." She actually put the back of her hand to her forehead in irritation, Helena realized, like a heroine in a '40s era melodrama, as though putting her relationship with Myka in its proper place - in a box stuck in a far corner of a guest room closet - was a crushing effort that only several glasses of champagne or the compliments of a suave leading man could relieve.

"It's clear to me you've never thought about her." Gigi's laughter was more good-humored than needling, but Helena felt a rare blush burn her cheeks.

"I'll remember to show you the same sympathy the next time the press asks you about the mayor's two-week 'business trip' to Belize or the late night 'speechwriting sessions' the two of you are said to have."

It wasn't just good-humored this time, Gigi's laughter, it delighted in what she saw as utter absurdity. "The taxpayer was never on the hook for the mayor's trip to Belize, and it was a business trip; he was working on the next election at a supporter's vacation home. And I would happily write his speeches without his assistance, but he insists on adding his personal touch."

"Yes, and I'm sure it's only your speeches that receive his 'personal touch,'" Helena said acidly.

"So much vituperation for a little teasing about a passing affair," Gigi clucked and wagged her finger in reproof. "I'm only the more set on meeting her now, you know, the mysterious Myka."

She's not the least bit mysterious, and that's part of her charm. Helena was smart enough not to say it aloud, but she felt her blush intensify. If she were a client, she would have fired her for such a poor choice of tactics.

A bout of nerves, an unaccustomed bout of nerves, Helena told herself with emphasis, that was what had been responsible for her maladroit handling of Gigi's curiosity about Myka. It hardly mattered now that the pool party was in full swing and, more importantly, that Gigi had been forced to sequester herself in a guest bedroom to deal with a mayoral emergency. Myka and Maddie had arrived and blended into the crowd without Gigi being any the wiser. And crowd it was. Christina had forgotten the number of friends she had invited, seven the same as 15 in her mind, apparently. Fifteen multiplied by not two but sometimes three or four, because not only were there parents for a number of children but their parents' spouses or significant others as well. Plus, although Adelaide had vowed that would avoid the "infestation of tweens" by staying with her mother over the weekend, she had nonetheless arrived in an aging Pathfinder filled to circus-clown-bursting level with friends. Who had nothing better to do than eat their body weight in wings and mini-cheeseburgers and profanely evaluate the respective merits of Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Adele, and Rihanna from a far corner of the patio. Boisterous, obnoxious teens - that she could manage. They were hardly different from many of her clients, only somewhat less rich. After reminding them so casually that they might have made the mistake of thinking she was merely suggesting that they should keep their swearing G-rated and their hands out of the chafing dishes, she pulled Adelaide aside and said, "If you want me to keep inventing reasons for why you don't have to attend your father's dinners and charity events as his pride and joy, you need to take your friends into the house or off the premises."

Adelaide was rather a pretty girl, her father's oversized features made proportional for a pleasantly round face, but she had all of his practicality. Her attitude toward Helena and Christina was that they were simply the newest and most significant targets of her father's acquisitive impulses, and Helena and Christina accepted her as the oldest and most cherished of Nate's possessions. It was an eminently reasonable arrangement that worked for everyone, especially Nate, as there were very few teenaged screams of "She's not my mother!" and stepmother-to-be demands that "She's your daughter, you deal with her." Understanding that she had no leverage, hating to be introduced as "my little girl" by her father to his business associates and wasting prime evening hours that she could be with her friends in the dining room of her father's house or various "event centers" instead, she shrugged in assent. Out of the corner of her eye, Helena watched her begin herding her friends into the house and, more than likely, down into the cavernous basement level which had game rooms, a gym, a movie theatre, and a large sitting area whose dominant feature was a freestanding double fireplace. They probably would encounter a few of the parents who had disappeared into the house to use the bathrooms but had yet to emerge. At least Nate's office and their bedroom were locked. Any self-guided tours conducted to uncover anything revealing his net worth or his sexual predilections were going to be frustrated.

The one parent who had shown little interest in the house and who was acting like the chaperone she had promised to be was Myka. She wasn't pacing the length of the pool, whistle at the ready. Her surveillance was slightly more disguised; she was attempting to referee the melee that had erupted in the pool into some semblance of a game. While she allowed a certain amount of horsing around, dunking heads under water and yanking down trunks or swimsuit straps weren't allowed. With a surprisingly piercing whistle between her thumb and forefinger, she would order the offending parties out of the pool and allow each team a free shot at the goal set up at the end of the pool. Direct throws into the goal earned a point; wild, caroming shots that hit a table or an umbrella and then ricocheted off the goal into the pool earned no points but an "Awesome effort!" Maddie, stretched out on a lounge chair next to the one occupied by her friend, whose name Helena had forgotten, did her best to ignore her mother's presence.

Helena, not usually in the position of envying an 11-year-old's sang-froid, wished she could be as oblivious as Maddie seemed to be to her mother's laughing, splashing, goal-announcing activity. Had Myka shown up in a poolside outfit that was the equivalent of the "urban hiking" ensemble that she had chosen for their outing to the art museum, Helena might have succeeded. Instead Myka was wearing a conservative one-piece in a medium blue, which, through understatement, accomplished what a more provocatively cut swimsuit would have failed to do, emphasized the toned length of leg, the well-defined arms (a testament to 10 lb. weights and repeated sets of raises and curls), and an admirably flat abdomen as teasers for what wasn't revealed. The 21-year-old Myka who had complained that she was a "stick" had needed the more discerning eye of a Helena Wells, who, though only slightly older in years was centuries advanced in experience, and thus could point out and then, after a mere matter of days (which had still been too long for her), demonstrate by running her hands over them, curves that would eviscerate anyone's opinion, including Myka's own, that she was a stick. "Stick in the mud, maybe," Myka had said after one particularly active session of having her negative body image revealed for the nonsense it was. Lying next to her, Helena stared at Myka's dorm room ceiling in dazed exhaustion. "Not where it counts, darling."

It was precisely because looking at Myka in that swimsuit, her hair throwing off coppery sparks in the sunlight, had her mind darting off in completely inappropriate tangents that Helena had been avoiding the pool. She played the gracious hostess by visiting each of her rented tables, taking refuge from the sun by positioning her chair under the umbrella so that it had its back to the pool. Her polite inquiries about her guests' comfort and enjoyment were battered by their effusions about the house, the grounds, and the loveliness of their setting: "It's woodsy but inviting, not in that North Woods' lyme-disease-waiting-to-happen way," "It must be like living in a resort 24/7," "Would you consider allowing us to buy in as a time-share?" If by resort, her guests meant the anonymity of its decor and furnishings; the army of support staff that kept Nate's home cleaned, trimmed, stocked with food, and ready to host an event at any time; and the loneliness that attested to how infrequently it was visited by the one who owned it, then, yes, she lived in a resort.

 **Christina**

Like her mother, Christina was making the rounds, but, unlike her mother, she wasn't trying to play the gracious host; she had forgotten how many people she had invited. (Gigi didn't count, 'cause Gigi invited herself after they had talked about the "plan.") There were the ones she had invited because she had been invited to their birthday parties and sleepovers; the ones she had invited because when she bragged about Nate's pool, they had made fun of her - and the pool; the one or two she had invited because they desperately wanted to be her friend and she needed to get a passing grade in math; the ones she had invited because she like the sound of their names (Sharif, Ursula) or because she liked the cut of their profiles against a classroom window; and the one she called the "wrong Jennifer" because, well, she had invited the wrong Jennifer.

Some she liked better than others; some she liked one day and not the next; some, like the wrong Jennifer, she didn't really know at all. But whether she liked them or how much wasn't important. It was about reciprocity, utility (her mom said "cultivation" was nicer), and competitive advantage. There were people who did you favors and expected favors in return; there were people who had something you needed; there were people who, if you let them show you up once, thought they owned you (and _that_ would never do); and then there were people whose names when you said them aloud sounded really cool. The whimsy was her own touch.

She glanced at the lounge chairs that Maddie and Sophie had been occupying since before the party started, and they were _still_ talking. How could you talk to one person for so long? How could you talk so long, period? All the same, it would be nice to have someone you could tell about the weird itchy, prickly feeling you had been having all afternoon, like you were getting a rash except that you knew you hadn't eaten anything with strawberries in it. You couldn't say to the people you traded favors with that you felt like you did when you had a nasty rash; you couldn't say to the geeky kid who worshipped you (and whose math homework you hoped to copy) that you were about to break out in hives; you couldn't ever mention the word "rash" to the kid who sneered "Pool? You mean wading pool, right?"; and you'd rather die than have to say "rash" and "Sharif" or "Ursula" in the same breath.

She cautiously touched the back of her neck. Her skin didn't feel warmer (or rougher) than normal. Her mom was sitting at a table with Kirsten's mom and Perry's dads. She couldn't be more out of the view of the pool if she tried. They had chatted a bit, her mom and Myka, when Myka, Maddie, and Sophie had first arrived, but that had been hours ago. Myka had stayed close to the pool, and sometime in it, chaperoning, while her mom had been doing this, talking with parents. Or checking on the food and drinks. Or ducking into the house, probably to make sure that people weren't putting their feet up on Nate's furniture or busting into his office. She had seen more than one of the parents snap a picture of the pool or the grounds; if she went out on Facebook, she would probably see, like, five of them out there on their accounts, with silly captions that were supposed to be funny, like "This is where I'm going to live when I grow up." No one but an adult would want to live out in the middle of nowhere like this. Even Adelaide complained about how far away it was; she lived with her mom in the city most of the time.

None of this was working out as it was supposed to. She didn't want so many bodies in her pool. The boys were probably doing gross boy things in it, blowing their noses between their fingers and washing the snot off in the water. And then her mom and Myka weren't even together. Myka was helping a littler kid, a baby brother of one of the invitees, paddle around in the shallow end, while her mom was 12 million miles away from the pool. She couldn't grumble to Gigi about how badly her and Maddie's plan was going because Gigi had been stuck in the house making phone calls for most of the day, "saving the world from democracy and preserving it for the mayor" her mom had joked. To top it off, Jordan, who could multiply large numbers in his head as fast as a calculator and, rumor had it, was teaching himself algebra and geometry, had been trailing her around all afternoon.

The itchy feeling intensified and Christina remembered how, when the dragons were let loose in _Game of Thrones_ (she wasn't supposed to watch it and she didn't . . . much . . . except that she did like catching the dragons in action), they would cast shadows on the ground as they glided above the cities they were about to burn to a crisp. She wasn't sure why it came to mind. Sure, she was cranky, but she didn't want to see everyone incinerated. Not even Jordan. Nothing had happened; everything was the same as it had been a moment ago. Except that Gigi, finally, had left the house to come out onto the patio, and she looked especially silvery in the sun.

 **Helena**

Just because she appreciated perfection, made a living, in fact, from creating the illusion of it, didn't mean that she wanted to be surrounded by it every bloody minute. She wasn't sure she could politely accept another bloody compliment on the order of "It's so perfect here." She found it more provoking than comments that she must love living in a resort because those, at least, she could always wring a joke from. "Except that if I leave the towels on the bathroom floor, there's no one to pick them up." Unfortunately her last reply to the comment had been on the snappish side, "Yes, but eventually you want to go home."

There were times, even recently, when she had been known to slop around in yoga pants with her hair in a ponytail and wearing no make-up, baring her imperfections. It didn't matter that the imperfections - the lines beginning to proliferate around her mouth, the suspect softness to her triceps, the bloodlessness of her lips in their natural state - were bared only to Christina (who was entering the years when mothers were hideous from head to toe), Nate, and whoever among the hired help were there that day. It mattered that she didn't feel she had to lock herself in the bathroom until she had exchanged the yoga pants for pants more form-fitting, applied foundation and lip gloss, and hidden her suspect triceps (which were regularly exercised, thank you very much) in something with sleeves.

Certainly her condo, where she and Christina had lived before moving in with Nate and Adelaide, was far from immaculate. The clutter and disorder that she ruthlessly banished from Future Image's office was on full display in their old home. Newspapers and magazines had littered tables, chair arms, and sofa cushions. Clothes hadn't always been put away, and Christina's room, frankly, had been more lair or burrow than room. Disorder, not perfection, was her natural state; Myka could attest to that. But she had lived in chaos long before she had arrived at the latest in a long line of sleepy liberal art colleges at which she had been trying, with a notable lack of effort, to finish her degree. She and Charles had been shuttled between sets of grandparents and other relatives during their parents' frequent, tempestuous separations only to be returned home upon their equally passionate reconciliations. Every reconciliation was a fresh start, which demanded a new home, and she and Charles would have to make new friends and learn new routes to their new schools. They would have just begun settling into their new life as a happy family when one or both of their parents would declare, with a fervor equal to that which had attended their earlier declarations of eternal love, that this was it, the end, she/he/they couldn't stand it any longer and "until things are sorted out, you'll be staying with your granddad." Or your Aunt Emily. Or your school friend, what's her name, Kathleen and her family.

Helena knew better than anyone that perfection was an illusion, but chaos was intolerable, especially when you were raising a child. In moving to this city, she had hoped to give her daughter something she had never experienced herself, and although what she had hoped for and what she had received were two very different things, she wasn't about to relinquish this, with Nate, for Myka Bering or, more accurately, what she had once represented, a very, very long time ago.

Feeling a sprinkler-like burst of perspiration on the back of her neck, Helena fluffed out her hair, trying to move the damp strands away from her skin. Yet no one else at the table seemed to be reacting to the sudden increase in humidity. The forecast hadn't called for rain, but everything stilled and grew eerily quiet, as though the birds, the flies swooping around the recycling bins and trash receptacles (also rented), even the blades of grass, were listening for the rumble of thunder. A storm was coming, wasn't it? Christina's friends and their parents sensed it, didn't they? Then, in that space between heartbeats, between her loud and uneven heartbeats, before the laughter and the splashing erupted once more, Helena identified the storm front, although there literally wasn't a cloud in the sky. Gigi had emerged from squelching the latest scandal threatening to reintroduce probity, transparency, and accountability in city politics, and, given the intentness with which she was staring, the work had made her hungry. But she wasn't looking at the food, no, not Gigi, she was looking at Myka.


	5. Chapter 5

_Stay the Way You Are, a Nice, Reliable, Settled, Comfortable Woman - Part Two_

 **Myka**

She wasn't sure why she had jumped in at that moment and volunteered to chaperone. Maybe it was because of the panicked look on her daughter's face as Maddie realized their outing at the art museum was coming to an end and that whatever she and Christina had planned wasn't likely to happen. It had been instinctive, a maternal desire to help her child. That was a little much, Maddie hadn't been hanging by her fingernails off a cliff. Or maybe she had done it, Myka thought, because of the pained look on Helena's face as Christina had all but clapped herself on the head with one of her poster tubes as she pretended to remember the pool party. Once upon a time Helena had been as clumsy - and charming - a liar, skating over a failed exam or her lack of study habits with the sunniest of smiles and kisses to the places where she knew Myka was most ticklish (the nape of her neck, behind her ears), claiming softly, "I'd be a straight A student if you weren't such a distraction." Myka had known better than to believe her (not completely, anyway), but it was nice to think she could have such an effect. But the Helena who had leveled a glare of Death Star magnitude at her daughter was . . . a grown-up, finally. Not the kind of grown-up Myka had imagined she would turn into, but perhaps everyone was destined to become a version of her parents, no matter how stoutly she had once resisted the possibility. Helena had spoken as darkly of the conservatism of her parents' politics as she had of the liberality they exhibited on a personal level, separating amid threats of divorce only to reconcile with equally passionate declarations. But here she was, the fiancée of Nate Robinson, corn mogul. Maybe, Myka conceded, she hadn't been able to resist twitting that glibly self-possessed business executive and giving her no escape from a tween pool party that had been invented only moments before.

Or maybe she had volunteered to chaperone because she wanted to see Helena one more time. As they had begun drifting away from each other in the museum's lobby, Myka had tried to reassure herself that it was okay that their meeting each other again after so many years didn't result in the connection that their meeting the first time had. Not the _same_ connection, she had practically - and nervously - giggled to herself; _that_ connection, which had led to a date the following night and then something best unnamed, still capable of making make her blush down to her toes even now, _that_ connection wasn't ever going to happen again. But it would have been nice to feel a remnant, a decidedly platonic one, of those old feelings. Having seen the professional mask Helena's face had assumed, her "I'm sorry but we've gone with someone else" smile barely working the muscles of her mouth, Myka realized that there was no remnant. It was gone, all of it. And that simply couldn't be.

But having volunteered, having received a curtly worded email from Helena just days ago confirming the party, Myka was questioning the wisdom of her impulsiveness. She usually did regret being impulsive. Some people could act on a whim and shrug off the mistakes that resulted; some people could be spontaneous and never experience the dangers that attended a lack of planning. She was not one of those people.

Exhibit 1 - her marriage to Sam, which, although it had produced Maddie (an event so well orchestrated that it had incorporated her preference for entering her third trimester in the fall rather than at the beginning of summer), had been more lunging for a life preserver than deciding that this was the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. After having her heart broken by Helena and her pride trampled on by Laurel, she had wanted someone who wouldn't challenge her to be more than she was but who also wouldn't encourage her to be less. She had been too cautious, too prosaic for Helena, she could admit it now. Not for her traipsing through Spain with only a wicked smile and a student credit card $500 short of being maxed out. On the other hand, rendezvousing with Laurel in the backseat of cars and in friends' apartments and then pretending they were just friends in front of Laurel's fiancé, it had been beneath her. Sam was immature and completely irresponsible when it came to money, but he was nice, and at that point in her life, being nice and undemanding and unable to focus on anything for longer than five minutes (except for sex), it was all she was asking for. Until, less than two years into their marriage, she remembered that she was Myka Bering, and she wanted a hell of a lot more than that. Of course, because she was Myka Bering, it had taken her another five years to admit it to herself and end her marriage.

Exhibit 2 - Michelle. No, that would be unfair because, on paper, they really were an ideal match. It would also be potentially devastating, because if Michelle were Exhibit 2, then she wouldn't have had a successful relationship since Helena, and since she could hardly consider her relationship with Helena successful, it would mean that she had never had a successful relationship, that all of them had been ill-advised and destined to end unhappily. Unless she widened the definition of relationship and counted Maddie, and how pathetic was that? Maddie was 11 and about as capable of fending for herself as a baby robin. Her daughter had to love her, she had no choice.

"I'd like to believe those are pleasant thoughts you're having," Dr. Frederic said with a sternness that wasn't entirely a pretense. "But I see the open Twizzlers package on your desk."

Myka was more aware of the half-eaten Twizzler dangling from her mouth, which, Irene, gracious as always, had chosen to ignore. Quickly biting through it and throwing the remnant into the wastebasket under her desk, she swallowed the chunk that was in her mouth and tried out what she hoped was a confident, I've-got-it-together smile, which would be even more persuasive if she didn't have flecks of Twizzler dotting her teeth. Did she? Irene always looked unflappable, no matter the crisis. Not that having pieces of Twizzler stuck to her teeth ranked with the campus protests that, earlier in the year, had greeted the arrival of a controversial speaker or the ethics violations committed by the athletic department and lecturers in the freshman core courses curriculum in a "pay for an A to play" arrangement (actually it had been pay for a C but C didn't rhyme as well as A), but it was embarrassing.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" Carefully tucking her skirt around her knees, Irene sat in a chair facing her across the desk, ready for a heart to heart . . . or a mass evacuation. Either one.

While she encouraged Maddie to be open with her, to share her feelings good and bad, Myka hadn't been brought up that way, and though the parenting style of Warren and Jeannie Bering was not one she had chosen to adopt with her daughter, Myka didn't regret the nonexistent opportunities to confide in her parents. She and her father hadn't agreed on much, but she did share in his conviction that feelings were a lot like eggs; they made a big mess if you didn't handle them right. You were best off touching them as little as possible and keeping them in an out-of-the-way place. Of course, you couldn't not feel, which was why sisters had been invented - for when you accidentally knocked the carton of eggs out of the refrigerator . . . . You confided in them, not your boss.

"Nothing to tell, Irene, really." She opened a folder on her desk that she hadn't looked at in the past 30 minutes. "I've been reviewing the president's plan for increasing our profile among the city's business leaders."

"By plan, you mean the president's hasty remarks just before he jetted off for another conference. In Honolulu, I believe." Irene patted the intricately woven braids of her hair. "The only plan he has is the one you'll have to invent for him, Myka."

"That's my job, Irene."

There was another pat to her hair. "For which he'll take all the credit." It might seem an unconscious tic, Irene's patting of her hair, but next to removing her glasses mid-speech, it was the best indicator of how frustrated she was. Myka had worked for Irene for too many years and next to too many unfortunates not to have concluded that if Irene took off her glasses as she was speaking to you, you needed to be ready to hand in your resignation by the end of the day. Unfortunately, taking off her glasses when she spoke with President Kosan didn't have the same effect. He was Frederic-proof, spending most of his time attending conferences in places like Las Vegas, Miami, and, now, Honolulu, while Irene merely kept the university functioning from day to day, no easy feat in the face of declining student enrollment and deeper budget cuts.

"If it works, what does it matter?" Myka smiled wearily.

"It matters," Irene declared firmly. "You do good work, and you should be recognized for it." Relenting, she drew a line in the air that paralleled the desk. "But it's not what you were thinking about. If you'd had coffee mugs lined up like soldiers in formation, I might have believed it."

Usually there were at least three in a row by this time in the afternoon. Myka knew that coffee was an environmental and social justice disaster as a stimulant. Michelle had encouraged her to give it up for eight glasses of water and eight hours of sleep per day, claiming that the change would strike a blow, albeit a small one, against the corporatist mentality that exploited farmers, the Earth, and her own body, but Myka just couldn't. The most she had been able to do was banish Keurigs from the administrative offices in favor of French presses and to bring in an assortment of coffee mugs from home.

Irene's look turned knowing. "But Twizzlers, that's when your heart's involved." She paused. "It's not Michelle again, is it?"

Had there been the faintest note of disapproval? Myka tried to engineer a look as coolly knowing and failed. She might as well give up the act. She tore the Twizzlers package completely open and offered Irene a twist. For awhile they sat in contented silence, chewing on Twizzlers. "No, it's Helena," Myka said, and though she had mentioned Helena's name only a handful of times in the almost 20 years she had known Irene, at times working for her and at times working for someone else but being no more than a dash across the hall from her office, she knew Irene would know what the admission meant.

She had met Irene when she had answered a job posting pinned to the bulletin board outside the Academic Affairs office. She had spent the better part of an hour in the office arguing with one of the provost's nameless assistants that she should be transferring to the university as a senior, not a junior. Had she returned to the college at which she had spent two very good years and then a magical/horrible third year, she would be a semester away from graduating. Returning was what she had intended to do; as devastating as her break-up with Helena had been, she wasn't going to let it prevent her from graduating on time. Helena was her love, but this, this, reading and thinking and discussing what she had read and thought, it was her life. Until her father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer following her junior year, the Helena year, and she had had to readjust her beliefs about what life was. She hadn't returned to college in the fall, she had helped her mother care for her father, made life as normal as possible for her 17-year-old sister, and worked part-time in the shoe department of a large retailer. (Maybe that was where her indifference to footwear had its origin, her trotting shoe boxes back and forth between the storeroom and customers who were determined to force their feet into shoes that didn't fit them. At times, especially as treatments failed and her father was moved to hospice care in the fall, she had been tempted to fling the boxes (empty of the shoes, of course) at the customers' heads, their stupid, stubborn heads, but she hadn't. She had only smiled and gently suggested a half size larger or wider.)

Warren Bering died in November, and in January, Myka, still helping her mother, still trying to ensure that Tracy had some semblance of a teenager's life, decided to transfer to the university. The student loan debt would be even more enormous, because she had had to give up her scholarship-paid-for tuition to that very wonderful and now Helena-free liberal arts college, but it was worth it. She needed something to feel finished . . . in a positive sense, and having a degree would get her out of the shoe department. But virtually a third of her credits didn't transfer, and she had the equivalent of a year to make up. Trying to understand how she had lost a year transferring from a far superior institution to a "kegger every Friday" university, she had come to stand in front of the bulletin board, and there she saw the job opening, a part-time administrative position in the External Affairs office. Applicants were to contact AVP Irene Frederic.

She hadn't met Irene that day; she didn't meet her until a couple of weeks later for an interview, and it had taken another week before she was hired, but Myka always considered that their history together, personal and professional, started from that day, not one of the worst days of her life but at the top of the "damn close" list. She had been Irene's top administrative assistant when Laurel had joined the office a year and a half later, an assistant (with an administrative assistant of her own) when she had met Sam on a task force that brought together External Affairs staff with their near cousins from the development office, and on the verge of being promoted to assistant vice president when she and Sam divorced. Myka had kept her tears and her arguments out of the office, but Irene had learned to read the bags of Twizzlers and other candy that would appear on her desk as a barometer of just how awful she was feeling. Laurel had rated half a bag of Twizzlers and a week's worth of candy bars, Sam a candy dish of salt-water taffy and bite-size Twizzlers for a year, Michelle a month-long conveyor belt from desk drawer to mouth of every Twizzler flavor that Myka could find - the first time. The second break-up had merited only an all-day Twizzler binge. Once, sometime during the periods of manic candy eating, Myka had only half-jokingly said, "Good thing I wasn't working here when I broke up with my college girlfriend. You probably would have found me suffocated under a mountain of candy wrappers."

"First loves," Irene had said, her imperturbable expression softening a fraction of an inch, "they're wonderful and exhilarating and, thankfully, never to be repeated."

As retentive as her memory was, Myka wouldn't have had any difficulty remembering her response, but what she had said was as true now as it had been then. "She wasn't a first love, Irene, she was an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink love. And then she took the sink, too."

Irene must have been remembering her words as well. "She's come back with the kitchen sink, has she? You have a dilemma. Just how eager are you to invite her back into your life, Myka?"

She's not entering it, Irene, Myka silently answered her. She's closing the door on me before I've made up my mind whether I want to close it on her. Rounding the corner, feeling more breathless than she would like by a run that had never pushed Remy out of an easy lope, Myka saw her house at the end of the street and thought, briefly, about sprinting the remaining distance. But there was no one to impress with her exertions, most especially her daughter who had a skinny child's certainty that she could always eat what she wanted when she wanted and a bookworm's disdain for exercising anything below her neck. Remy danced a little ahead of her, pulling at the leash in encouragement, but Myka slowed to a walk, feeling her skin doubling down on the amount of sweat it was producing. If there was no one to impress, there was no one who had to smell or touch her sweaty body, except Maddie, and Maddie was already beginning to enter that stage in which everything about her mother was icky; the sight of her dripping forehead and glistening arms and legs would be enough to drive Maddie to her bedroom for the rest of the night.

Her house, 150 years ago, had been a marvel of Victorian architecture, and under the frosting of turrets and dormer windows and intricately carved woodwork, there was a sturdy, two-story structure that Myka had become convinced she could reclaim from the years of abuse it had suffered as off-campus housing for the university's students. Maddie had been too young to stop her when they had walked through it with a real estate agent who, by the effect of the glowing picture he had drawn of a home restored to its nineteenth-century gingerbread glory, realized the truth of the saying that there's a sucker born every minute. Six years later the house still looked dilapidated, but at least no one could walk past it and imagine a drunken undergraduate leaning out of a second-story window to pee on the grass. Which had actually happened because the nineteenth-century house had had, shockingly, nineteenth-century plumbing. She had been able to address that at least, but there was so much more, so much, much more.

Maddie had been reading on the front porch's glider when Myka left for her run, but now she was on the steps, sitting next to Pete Lattimer. He was in his usual summer uniform of baggy cotton athletic shorts and extremely snug tee. Myka could admire his well-developed pecs and taut abs without confirmation that there was a six-pack under the shirt. It wasn't that he was a man, it was that he was Pete, and she could no more imagine herself running her hands over his chest than she could imagine herself kissing Irene. There were some people who had the ability to flip the switch in your head that would shut off the stray "Could I ever . . ." and "If we were the last two people on Earth, would we . . . " and Pete was one of those people for her. His mouth was going at its usual speed, too; if he wasn't eating, he was talking, and sometimes both simultaneously. Happily, there were no half-masticated chunks of food flying out of his mouth like missiles.

He stood up and vigorously waved at her, as if somehow she might manage to overlook him if he didn't. "Hey, Mykes, I was dropping off JP with his mom, and I thought I would see if you and the rugrat were around. I have a business proposition."

Over glasses of iced tea and, yes, a few aging Fig Newmans for Pete, she heard him out. (She found it as difficult to refuse him snacks as she did Remy, unable to say to no to either set of pleading brown eyes.) He wanted to hire Maddie for occasional Saturday morning work as a "peer coach" for the soccer team he was coaching. "Your team is called the Soccer Sprouts, they're a bunch of five-year-olds, Pete. How, exactly, is Maddie their peer?" Myka held her sweaty glass of iced tea to her sweaty forehead and rolled it from side to side for marginal relief. By raising her arm, she was probably releasing a cloud of poisonous vapor from her armpit, but, thankfully, Pete wasn't someone she was worried about impressing. She had never thought she was missing an older (by ten months) brother in her life, but, given the ease with which he had slipped into the slot, Pete must be what she had been looking for without even knowing it. Pete and Helena . . . if they were her missing halves, no, thirds, whatever, she really needed to reread Plato.

Myka had a fair idea of what was behind his proposition, which, while great for Maddie (her own money plus yielding a larger benefit in boosting her self-confidence), had little on the plus side for Pete and the kids he was coaching. Myka loved her daughter, but she knew that Maddie moved like she did when she was 11, as if her arms and legs were each listening to the beat of a different drummer. Maddie had brains and heart and was, quite possibly, the worst soccer player in the Midwest.

Pete wormed another Fig Newman from the package. "Anyone can teach the kids the basic skills and plays, but it takes someone with persistence, with enthusiasm, who knows how to dig deep, to give them the passion for the game. That's what Maddie'll bring."

He had almost had her, Myka mused, until he oversold on the "passion" bit. Maddie had played soccer for two years, and the last year had been a struggle for Myka to get her into the uniform and to the practices and games on time. Maddie had promised that she would stay in orchestra "forever, Mom!" (i.e., until high school graduation) if only she could quit soccer. The one thing she had loved about it was Pete. Even though Maddie hadn't so much as kicked at a soccer ball in over three years, Myka knew that she would occasionally drop in on a practice on her way home from school just to talk to him. Pete wasn't just the older brother she had never had, he was, in some ways, more a father to Maddie than her own father was, and to give him his due, Pete had taken to the role, giving her daughter wise counsel (or, since he was Petel, giving her counsel that didn't result in utter catastrophe at least) and, more importantly, being an adult whom she could rely on who wasn't her mother. The only thing she wouldn't trust Pete with was advising Maddie on her homework, especially after stopping by the practice field herself one day and seeing their heads bent over the Darth Vader spiral-bound notebook in which Pete kept track of the team's expenses and hearing Maddie gently chiding him with "Pete, you forgot to carry the 2" and "19 minus 9 is not 9."

She owed Pete a lot, but he wasn't a saint and he wasn't above working a situation to his advantage, especially when it came to women. He loved coaching kids, but he also loved the opportunities it gave him to mingle with their mothers, a good number of whom were single mothers. He really was a dog. "I imagine Maddie - if she and I were to agree to this - would work primarily with the kids who are struggling?" Pete vehemently nodded his head. "A child like Cameron Davies? Really sweet but has some coordination issues." Pete's nodding slowed and his expression grew wary.

"Cameron's definitely a kid who Maddie could help in the enthusiasm department," he said, scaling back the hard sell. "He's shy."

"Do you know that I work with his mother, Leena? She's in the Academic Affairs office, just down the hall from me." She stared at him unblinkingly. He wasn't going to weasel out of having to look at her. Of course he knew that she worked with Leena. Without looking away from him, she asked Maddie, "I think I hear noises from the hall closet. Will you go check and see if Remy's chewing the flip-flops again?"

"If you want to talk privately to Pete, why not just say so?" Maddie grumbled, slouching out of the kitchen.

Myka lowered her voice to a growl. "You're using my daughter as a panderer, Pete."

"What?" He sounded both outraged and puzzled. In consternation he spoke through the Fig Newman he was eating, spraying a not-so-fine mist of crumbs over the table. "I don't know what a 'panderer' means exactly, but it doesn't sound good, and I would never involve Maddie -"

"In a scheme to hit on Cameron's mother?"

"Oh, so that's what a 'panderer' means," he said, enlightened. Smiling slyly at her, which was somewhat akin to the credulous expression Elmer Fudd would wear after hatching a "brilliant" plan to outwit Bugs Bunny, he said, "Maddie's not my panderer, you are. After all, who's going to take Maddie to those 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning games and pick her up after those 5:00 p.m. practices?"

"Pete," Myka said, protestingly. "Okay, maybe 'panderer' is too strong, but the Bering women are not women you want as matchmakers. If something's going to develop between you and Leena, it'll happen with or without our help."

She tried to look at Pete objectively, which was hard because he had a ring of cookie crumbs around his mouth. He and Leena's husband had both been Marines, but the similarities ended there. Cameron Davies, Sr. had died in Afghanistan when his son was a baby, heroically attempting to save the lives of fellow Marines pinned down by a sniper. Pete had been honorably discharged from the Marines but he had seen action no more taxing than that to be found servicing and repairing aircraft on a base in Okinawa. Leena's husband had been awarded medals before his death and awarded even more after it. Handsome, brave, intelligent, the life of the party as well as a natural leader, Cameron Davies had had plans to serve his country after his discharge, intending to get a law degree and, eventually, enter politics. Myka had heard nothing less glowing from Leena or her family during the summer barbecues and Christmas parties the university - and Irene - had hosted over the years. Pete had his own brand of courage, but battling successfully against a decade-long addiction to alcohol wasn't heroic in the same way. Then there was Leena's often-repeated declaration that "If, and I mean if, I marry again, it will be to a man who can be a strong, proud, role model for my son, a strong, proud, African-American role model."

Pete was a great guy, but . . . Myka tried not to wince at the hopefulness of his expression. Damn, there were those eyes again. She found herself reaching for one of the Fig Newmans and repressing a shudder as she nibbled at it. She had bought them for Ethan the day they had all gone to the movies during Maddie's stay at summer camp, but he had taken one look at the cookies and begun to cry. "Pete," she said more softly.

"I know she's out of my league, Mykes, that's why I'm asking for some help." Realizing what she was looking at, he lifted his hand to the back of his mouth to wipe away the crumbs and then thought better of it, applying a napkin instead. "And what's with this 'it'll happen naturally'? Aren't you letting Maddie and what's her friend's name," he snapped his fingers rapidly, "Christina? Aren't you letting Maddie and Christina fix you up with her mom?"

"That's not what it is, Pete. It's an entirely different thing." Suddenly Myka wanted nothing more than to pull her tank away from her chest and pour the melted ice in her glass between her breasts. "The girls struck up a friendship at camp and, coincidentally, Helena and I knew each other in college. It's a different, different thing. There's no fixing up going on, on either side."

"Uh, huh. Which is why you guys went to the art museum, which is why you're chaperoning the pool party Christina's throwing." His eyes were no longer pleading, they expressed a grievous sense of injury, much like Remy's would when Myka pried a well-chewed flip-flop from her jaws. "Helena's engaged, Myka. Leena's out of my league, but at least I'm not chasing someone who's out of bounds."

 **Maddie**

She and Sophie had emptied a bottle of 100spf sunscreen lotion between them. Probably not necessary given the shade provided by the umbrella overhead, but you never knew when an adult or one of Christina's obnoxious friends might commandeer the chairs she and Sophie were reclining on, and they would be pushed out into the sun like tiny baby rabbits or starfish. Christina had been making the rounds most of the afternoon, very much a miniature Helena Wells, except for the t-shirt that she had slipped over her bathing suit, a men's crewneck with blue sinuous curves painted on the front, resembling a peacock's head and neck, and, on the back, a fan-shaped splash of iridescent green, blue, and orange. Kind of clever, Maddie grudgingly admitted. She was in a mood, she realized, which made anything but grudging acceptance difficult, because this afternoon was not turning out the way she had hoped.

She hadn't expected to see her mother and Helena fly into each other's arms and kiss. Ish. But they were acting as though the other one didn't exist. Helena had been shaking hands and giving air hugs and kisses and sampling pretty heavily from the beverage ends of the buffet tables when she wasn't enthusiastically greeting the parents of Christina's friends. Now she was sitting at a table with her back to the pool, laughing it up with some of the parents. As for her mother, Maddie raised her head to scornfully stare at Myka. She had been in the pool most of the afternoon, refereeing the kids like she had been a daycare provider all her life.

"Hey, what page are you on?" Sophie had lifted her head from her tablet to squint at her. They had started reading a new YA science fiction trilogy a couple of nights ago, and Sophie always liked to stop after a few pages and ask her if she thought the future would really be like this. Sophie's mother was a physics professor at the same university where her mother worked, and Sophie said her mom thought a lot of the YA science fiction was silly. In fact, Sophie's mom thought fiction in general was silly, so Sophie frequently asked her whether she, Maddie, not a child prodigy like Professor Levinson had been, believed that people could teleport to different planets or, with a simple Bluetooth-looking device, access others' memories, as though Maddie's opinion carried the same weight as her mother's. "Do you think Kazimir can really recombine his DNA and turn himself into someone else?"

"Um, I'm still on page 75. Kazimir's only turned a butterfly into a tarantula." Maddie was caught by the almost synchronous turn of Christina's and Helena's heads. They were staring at a woman who had come out onto the patio. She suddenly stretched, which seemed to draw every male eye, with the exception of the eyes of the men at Helena's table, and not a few of the women, but she seemed unaware of the attention. Maddie thought she heard Helena snort, but maybe she was only coughing because she had her fist up to her mouth as though her cherry-red drink, her fourth or fifth of the same color by Maddie's count, had gone down the wrong way.

Christina ran to greet the woman, tugging on her hand and leading her toward the pool. "Come on, Gigi," Maddie heard her cry. "I want to introduce you to some of my friends."

So this was Gigi, the potential wrench in their plans, _her_ plans, because Christina would be more than happy to see her mom and her mom's ex-girlfriend get back together, leaving the door open for another ex-girlfriend, namely Michelle, to try to win back her own mom. There had been no new developments on that front since the matinée of a few weeks ago, at least none that her mother had mentioned. Which meant there could have been lunches she didn't know about, casual drop-ins at her mom's office during which Michelle could have been reminiscing about those awful dinners with Ethan or how they had (not) watched _The Voice_ together. Michelle could be making inroads on her mother's not-so-formidable resistance, especially as her resistance was usually halfway gone when she thought she was needed or missed, which Maddie had learned through careful testing. She steeled herself for another glance at Helena, expecting to discover that half-chagrined, half-wistful look actresses on TV always had when they learned that the cute surgeon/detective/lawyer who had come to their rescue was already married or hooked up with a "terrific woman" who was conveniently offscreen. But that wasn't Helena's look at all, she looked like she was witnessing a really bad accident, one that in Maddie's imagination involved lots and lots of blood. Helena's mouth had dropped open and her eyebrows were arched high above her sunglasses as Christina, continuing to tug at Gigi like a sled dog in harness, shouted to her mom, "Hey, Myka, come meet my friend Gigi" and then a little faster than if it had been in afterthought "Hey, you too, Maddie and . . . Sophie? Effie? Uh, Maddie's friend."

Christina could have forgotten to include her altogether and she had sort of gotten Sophie's name right. It was Christina. How much more could she expect? As for Helena's look of horror, Maddie refused to confirm what she knew it was - her mom had reached for a kid she thought was drowning or lunged after a ball about to whiz out of the pool and her breasts had fallen out of her suit. Last summer one of her mom's bathing suit straps had flopped over her shoulder and she didn't pull it up for, like, minutes. Maddie had known then that it was only going to be a matter of time before _they_ were out there for the world to see, and it had happen to now.

 **Myka**

She's out of bounds. Pete's pearls of wisdom were few, but this was one to keep in mind. Myka thumbed the water out of her eyes as a tween boy dove underneath the surface with an unnecessarily aggressive kick, splashing water in a wide arc. Spangled with the drops of water beading her eyelashes, the back of Nate's house looked no less an overbuilt self-tribute to his prowess than its front. The "patio," as Helena called it, was an enormous expanse of travertine that extended into a yard that extended, in turn, for hundreds and hundreds of acres. Or so it seemed. And the caterer she had hired for this kids' pool party? Her own university couldn't afford to hire it.

This was the house that Nate built and Helena had made her home in it. A ball was rocketing toward Myka and she automatically raised a hand to slap it away, accepting as automatically the shouts of "Sorry!" and "Wyatt did it, not me." Too bad that her reflexes, which had gained in speed and precision when she had to look after her uncoordinated child, reverted to their natural sluggishness when it came to Helena. She would look away from her only to feel her eyes slide in their sockets as they sought her out again. Myka hadn't intended to spend the entire afternoon actively chaperoning the kids; she had hazily pictured the parents trading off the responsibility and she had then pictured herself, once her obligatory half-hour was over, sampling the finger food to the accompaniment of Helena's wry commentary on the party. Her assumption that the other parents would pitch in was her mistake for thinking this really was a kids party but no more naive than her hope that Helena might join her in the line for the mini corn dogs. Maybe there was no better reality check than protecting the younger children from pool wedgies, unassisted, while Helena, playing the gracious hostess, stopped at every table, wearing a bikini, four pocket squares held together by a breath, that would daunt younger women.

Smiling at her bout of self-pity, Myka turned her head back toward the pool, only to be doused by another sheet of water, erupting from the simultaneous plunge, feet first, of several of Christina's closest friends into the pool. How many of them could Christina even name? There followed more thumbing of water from her eyes, a clipped "Please don't do that" issued in tandem with a murderous look, and, after making sure there was no child with his trunks pulled over his head or chained to the bottom of the pool, she glided toward the steps. She held a hand out for balance as she pushed through the water to find her footing and felt it gripped by a hand that, despite its softness and impeccably trimmed and polished fingernails was more than capable of steadying her.

It wasn't Helena's hand. It wasn't just larger and softer, it hadn't tried to push her back into the water.

"Thanks." Myka let that hand draw her up the steps, experiencing a flash of pleasure at the top when she realized that she was shorter, by an inch or two, than the woman who had helped her out of the pool. It was an old-fashioned satisfaction but she had always preferred that those offering her a casual gallantry be the taller.

"Myka," Christina was practically hopping with impatience, "I was calling and calling you. This is my friend Gigi."

"Giselle Fourier," the woman said, offering her that soft-strong hand again, this time in a handshake. "But I refuse to answer to 'Giselle,' I'm 'Gigi' to friends and enemies alike."

There were few women who could carry off a nickname like Gigi, Myka thought, but this woman did, from the teasingly prim chignon in which she had captured what would be, of course, an abundance of ash-blond hair (Farrah Fawcett meets Grace Kelly) to the teasingly molded fit of her bikini. You wouldn't remove it so much as peel it from her, and Myka blushed at how readily she had arrived at the conclusion and blushed harder when the image of peeling a peach or plum immediately followed it, their skin so thin that she always ended up digging her fingers into the flesh. She coughed, suddenly aware of the hair plastered to her head, her eyes red-rimmed from the combination of sun and chlorine. "Myka Bering," she choked out charmlessly.

"So Christina's been endlessly repeating. Very nice to meet you, Myka." The smile was as casually gracious as the helping hand up the pool steps and even more attractive because, yes, Myka conceded, she was having to look up the tiniest bit to receive the full effect of it.

"I thought I'd see what food is left, now that the lines are gone." What she needed to do was to duck into Helena's house and find a bathroom in which she could put herself together. Comb her hair, readjust her swimsuit, which, thoroughly waterlogged, was settling into crevices she didn't have the nerve to publicly reconnoitre. Instead, she asked, mesmerized by irises as light as Helena's were dark, "Care to join me?"

"I've heard the mini cheeseburgers are good."

Christina tagged along with them, disbelief written on her face. Myka regarded her warily; Maddie adopted that alarmed look whenever her mother had committed a faux pas too egregious to be named and yet, apparently, known only to 11-year-old girls. "Do I have a swimsuit malfunction I don't know about?"

"Gigi's the one having a malfunction. She doesn't eat." Christina clapped her hand over her mouth as though she had just revealed a secret.

"It's true," Gigi said gravely. "Human pleasures are unknown to me."

It was on the tip of Myka's tongue to reply "That's a shame because you're built for them," but she didn't make suggestive remarks in public or to strangers or in front of children. Nevertheless, Gig's casually gracious smile became wider and knowing, as though she had heard every word Myka didn't say. Gesturing aimlessly at the buffet tables because she wasn't sure she knew how to respond to, or handle, that smile, Myka nearly clipped the head of a boy who was darting under her arm to take a position next to Christina.

"Jordan," Christina greeted him with exasperation.

"Sorry, Jordan," Myka said, and then with the same gulping and crimsoning she would have experienced had she actually said something suggestive to Gigi, she said, "I try to help children, not hurt them." She had meant it to be funny, taking a jab at her awkwardness, but Gigi was looking at her as if she could see straight back to her first day of school, not missing a single gaffe, blunder, or ugly spill along the way.

"You sat in the first row in the classroom, and the boy who was all knees and the girl who had nosebleeds were picked for teams before you were." Myka nodded. The details weren't right, but they weren't all that far off the mark. She was picked before the girl who kept saying her heart would burst if she had to run as part of the game. "And," Gigi tapped her chin musingly, "you played saxophone in your school's band."

"Oboe," and because she couldn't resist adding it, "first chair."

"Of course."

They sat a table vacated by the parents of one of the two Jennifers and the parents and step-parents of Kylie, who were leaving to attend another party "just down the road" so one of them said. Watching them walk away, Myka murmured, behind the cheeseburger poised to enter her mouth, "You mean the one paved with gold that runs through the peasant villages."

If she wasn't embracing with gusto her introduction to the human pleasure of eating, Gigi was at least welcoming it, ensuring that her plate held more than one mini appetizer and chips that hadn't first been painstakingly counted out. Turning an amused eye on Myka, Gigi said, "Born with a wooden spoon in your mouth and proud of it?"

"Wooden and splintered, so my grudge is deep-seated." Myka grinned. She was a mess while the woman sitting next to her was stunning, but after her initial bout of nerves, she was feeling . . . okay. Better than okay, relaxed, letting the chlorinated tangle of her hair dry in the sun and discreetly shifting in her chair to work her swimsuit out from the crannies it had settled in.

In the amount of time it had taken them to select their food from the chafing dishes and to find this table, which, set apart from the others and offering the illusion that this whatever-it-was between them, maybe, in the end, just a friendly conversation to pass the afternoon, was unconnected to the party, Myka had learned two interesting things about Gigi. One was that, like her, Gigi had grown up in the city, and, second, unlike her, she had been offered a modeling contract while still in high school. "To think," Gigi had finished dryly, "ten years ago almost to the day, I gave up my exciting career of modeling lingerie for catalogs and sales flyers to come home and take a job in the mayor's office. You may have seen some of my work lining the bottom of your Target shopping cart."

Gigi might have a jaundiced appreciation of her former career, but Myka was battling not to think about her in a black negligée. The bite of the mini cheeseburger she was chewing became so much sawdust as she banished the image from her mind - again - and she had to drain the rest of her bottle of water to get the bite down.

" . . . wooden, silver, brass. The mayor collects spoons. He doesn't care what kind they are because he can eat from all of them." Gigi nibbled at a mini meatball, then put it down to break off a particle of potato chip.

"Are you chastising me or hitting me up for a contribution?" Myka had voted for Larry Jenkins in both elections, but only because he had been the sole viable alternative to a former prosecutor-turned-conservative-radio-talk-show-host. There was a whiff (sometimes more than a whiff) of corruption and cronyism about their current mayor; on the other hand, Gigi would make a terrific gangster's moll.

"You're the face of external affairs for the university, and you're benefiting, indirectly, from the largesse of one Nate Robinson, who, as he tells it, ate with no spoons as a child, just his bare hands." Gigi waved behind her toward Robinson Manor. "He's a generous donor to several nonprofits and charities, and his name alone attracts other investors. Plus you have an in with him already. Helena's his fiancée."

An in I would prefer to ignore, Myka thought but didn't say. "In better times, I dealt with community groups and schools for the most part, strengthening the university's presence in the community and promoting it as a 'force for good.' There was someone else to gladhand the business leaders and flatter them into setting up joint ventures and other 'mutually beneficial partnerships.' Chad loved it, but he fled for greener pastures when the university started its budget cutting. Now I have to woo the movers and shakers, and I'm not much of a wooer." Myka closed her eyes in chagrin. Why, why did she use "woo"? All it did was bring up the image of Gigi in a negligée _and_ confirm her ineptness. There went the relaxation - she felt waves of blushes rolling up into her face like it was high tide.

"I doubt that," Gigi said softly. "I think you value sincerity, Myka. When you feel passionately about something, I bet it's hard for people to say no to you."

Without intending to, Myka let her eyes pick out Helena, who, surprisingly, had pulled up a lounge chair and was talking to Maddie and Sophie by the pool. "Not so hard," she said, her voice both rueful and resigned.

"Hey, Myka." Christina leaned over the back of Myka's chair, Jordan, an admiring shadow, swiftly coming to her side. "I'll get that t-shirt made for you in a couple of weeks. I need to think about the design." She scampered off in the direction of the house, fruitlessly trying to shake the persistent Jordan.

"What t-shirt?" Gigi smiled at another youth passing by their table. "Would you be so kind as to get us a couple of bottles of water?" He goggled for a second at that smile, poorly mirroring it with an awestruck one of his own, before hurrying to the beverage table.

That was wooing, convincing someone who, mere seconds ago, might not have been aware of your existence (although hard to believe in Gigi's case) that pleasing you was his sole mission in life. Telling herself that it came easily to Gigi because all men, fundamentally, were 12-year-old boys didn't undercut the effect. If Gigi worked in the External Affairs office - Myka had to rapidly blink away the scenarios prompted by that fantasy. "I asked Christina to design a t-shirt for me like the peacock one she's wearing, but with a dolphin."

Gigi's eyes widened, and there was a rising note of surprise in her voice. "You're commissioning art from someone who just finished fifth grade?"

"She's talented," Myka explained, "why wouldn't I encourage her efforts? She's charging me $25, so she already has a feeling for what her work might be worth someday." As Gigi continued to stare incredulously at her, Myka said, "Talent's talent, no matter the age. She's no less an artist just because she's a kid."

"I'm beginning to understand why Christina likes you so much." As Myka pulled a face, Gigi laughed. "It's not because she's $25 richer today than she was yesterday, it's because you get her, get what's important to her. She can be closed off, like her mom."

It was Myka's turn to stare incredulously. "You think Helena's hard to read?" Shrugging, looking down and away, she added quietly, "Maybe she is now."

Holding out the two bottles of water as if he hoped she might autograph them, the boy Gigi had sent off to retrieve them waited for her to acknowledge him. With another artfully pleased smile, she did so by saying, "Thanks very much. You were a lifesaver." His thin chest swelling with the pride of a man who had just prevented two ugly dehydration deaths, he mumbled something that sounded like "Anytime" and dashed off to join his friends near the pool. Passing a bottle to Myka, Gigi asked, "Why a dolphin?"

"Beautiful, smart, graceful. I know they're as much a predator as sharks are, but they just look kind." Myka wagged her head in self-deprecation.

"You're describing yourself."

"You're flattering me."

"No," Gigi said, suddenly serious, "I'm not." She sent a surveying glance across the patio and, finding Helena, still talking to Maddie and Sophie, it settled on her briefly. Then she angled her body in her chair, putting Helena more decidedly behind her, and focused her gaze on Myka. "We should continue our conversation about wooing the city's business leaders. I have some experience in that area." She said the last playfully with a playful smile, but as they looked at each other, her smile grew more intent. "Maybe over coffee . . . or dinner?"

Were those irises blue? Gray? Silver? White? While they weren't windows to her soul necessarily, they were windows to something, and Myka felt emboldened enough to demand, "Are you asking because you work for the mayor and you're not one to miss an opportunity to promote his interests, or are you asking for you?"

"You're right. I don't overlook opportunities - of any kind. We could have coffee and see if the university and the mayor's office have some common goals, but I'm even more interested in having dinner and seeing what we have in common." Her brows quirked and Gigi laughed at herself. "Oh my God, I've become the clueless loser at the bar in a romcom. Did I just completely blow my chance at having dinner with you?"

Was Gigi so smooth she could inject a goofy, self-conscious Myka-Bering-like moment? Or did a dork actually lurk within that former model? A soft-strong hand covered hers, the thumb grazing the underside of Myka's palm. Black negligées swam in front of her eyes. "No, you just made a great save by admitting what a lame come-on that was. I'm interested in both, coffee and dinner." The animal on Gigi's t-shirt wouldn't be a strutting peacock or a friendly dolphin, not with those light eyes. A raptor, that's what her t-shirt animal would be. Myka repressed a shiver, but it wasn't from fear.


	6. Chapter 6

_I Know I Don't Say Things Like How You Want to Hear 'Em_

 **Helena**

She hadn't been to the spin class in months, not since she had moved into Nate's house and had a spinning bike she could use at any time for as long as she wanted (which was never as long as she knew she should be on it). Actually, she had a choice of spinning bikes because Nate kept a few in his gym. It wasn't uncommon when he decided to work from home that one or more of his assistants would be expected to work with him, and if Nate decided he wanted a status update on various projects as he worked out, then his assistants should have remembered to bring along their workout clothes. It was during a spin class, in fact, as she and Gigi were transitioning from being not-very-well-suited lovers to the much more comfortable and natural position of being friends-with-an-edge that Gigi had suggested she consider trying to land Nate Robinson, as a client, of course. Nate was a "friend of ol' Larry" (an awkwardly manufactured acronym, Helena admitted, but it succinctly captured her opinion of Larry Jenkins and those who associated with him, Gigi being an exception . . . most of the time). Gigi, thus, was well positioned to arrange a meeting so Helena present to him the wealth of services that Future Image could provide.

She didn't want to think about that meeting now and all that had come from it. She felt guilty and ridiculous enough as it was tracking down Gigi in one of her lairs to find out what had resulted from her cozy tête-à-tête with Myka. The pool party had been two weeks ago, and while she hadn't expected to hear from Myka, she was surprised that Gigi hadn't called to snark or gloat or otherwise torment her. That was how they operated, she and Gigi; everything wasn't always a contest (Gigi's offer to set up a meeting with Nate, for example) but, on the other hand, there was nothing that couldn't become one. She would feel responsible if Gigi ran down Myka like a Thomson gazelle simply because she could. That was why she was here at 8:05 a.m. on a Saturday morning, in this windowless studio with a video of the Tour de France on the screen and house music blasting from the speakers, scanning the curved backs for Gigi's unmistakable lines. She made even crouching over a bike sexy.

"Hey, Helena, it's great to see you again. There's an empty spot right here in the front row." The instructor, a young woman probably half her age, was speaking around her Bluetooth and jabbing a finger toward said empty space, which wasn't next to Gigi. In fact, Gigi wasn't here, which evoked images worse than that of a lioness clamping her jaws onto a gazelle's haunches. Summoning a weak smile, Helena gingerly climbed onto the bike, murmuring apologies to the people on either side of her, and started pedaling.

Her mood hardly improved by 45 minutes of vigorous spinning, Helena carelessly tossed her gym bag toward the closet when she returned home. As usual, it was just her and Christina this weekend, Adelaide was in town with her mother and Nate was on a ten-day trip to Mexico and Central America. The thump of the bag hitting the tile sounded especially loud and hollow and . . . lonely . . . this morning. "Hey, Mom, you're home," Christina shouted, running into the house from the patio and sounding uncannily like the spin class instructor, all bubbling good spirits. Was it okay to intensely dislike your daughter for the space of a second? Helena had no sooner banished the alarming spurt of irritation than Christina was asking, "I finished Myka's t-shirt. Can we drop it off at her house today? Please?"

Helena felt another flash of intense irritation; this time directed at Myka. She was completely in favor of artistic expression – as a hobby, an avocation. Art was not an employer, art did not provide a salary or a 401(k) or health benefits, which was all well and good if you were Picasso or, alternatively, Thomas Kinkade, but disastrous as a career choice if you weren't supremely talented (either artistically or commercially). Helena wouldn't deny that Christina was talented, in fact, she was relieved that Christina showed interest in _something_ , but Christina had many talents (she was a Wells, after all), and the more . . . remunerative . . . of them should be exercised as well. However, when Christina raced back down the stairs carrying the shirt she had wildly run up to find and snapped it out like a towel for her mother's appraisal, Helena had to admit that it was both striking and well executed; the dolphin or, rather, the dolphins were suggested, not drawn to life, several sinuous lines arcing up to rounded points, triangles clustered at the bottom representing their tails. They were presented like a bouquet, gleaming gray against the blue of the t-shirt, their noses or snouts the blooms. Helena thought the top of the bouquet would hit Myka about mid-breast . . . all those rounded points. She bit back her smile. Another woman less modest than Myka would enjoy the, ah, emphasis.

"That's the back," Christina said with what Helena could have sworn was a sardonic glint. She turned the shirt around. "This is the front." A row of tiny dolphins – drawn more true to life - lined the bottom hem and circled the cuffs and the neckline.

Clever girl to think of that and a bit of the wiseass girl to be putting her mother on like that. Helena said admiringly, "Very nice," at the same time she gave her daughter an admonishing look that signaled "Don't play your mum for the fool." Christina responded with an expression that was entirely unrepentant or, equally as possible, entirely uncomprehending. "Can you call her, please, and ask her if we can come by with the shirt?"

"This isn't the same as returning something you borrowed from next door," Helena complained, although she was already reaching for her phone. "I have work to get done today, and I don't have much time to be ferrying you back and forth to the city." That might be laying it on a bit thick – and she thought she heard Christina mutter sarcastically, "What do you call 'next door' out here?" – but despite her obsessive tracking down of Gigi, she didn't actually want to see Myka. She didn't want to see a permanent afterglow settled on her face like a glaze. After her own first weekend with Gigi, Helena had had fears that her lips might be permanently crooked into a smirk. But even more than that, she didn't want to see the afterglow married to a look in Myka's eyes that managed to be both stunned and reverent, the look that had been in them the first time Myka had told her that she loved her. Lust Helena could handle, none too graciously, but she could accept it. Gigi was . . . Gigi, and everyone else, including Myka, was merely human. Anything of a higher order emotion . . . . She wasn't sure why it bothered her so much. Maybe it was because only Myka, out of all of her lovers, had ever had that particular look, as if she were seeing in Helena the beginnings of the universe or an event nearly as marvelous to which she was the only witness. It was a look that, in making something out of her that was grand and beautiful, made Helena acutely aware of how small and ordinary she was. Humility didn't come easily to her, but it was what she had felt when she had been the recipient of that look.

Yes, yes, she impatiently shushed the wistful little voice. That look from Myka had meant everything when they were very young and stupid in love with each other. But she was a grown-up now with a business and a child and fiancé, and she had no time to be a window onto the universe for a lover – or to inspire any similar romantic twaddle. Recklessly Helena called her, wishing, for the only time in her life, that she could use a rotary phone so she could watch how carelessly, how cavalierly she was flicking the dial. Jabbing her finger at a touch screen didn't have the same flair. Helena's irritation only grew when Myka answered the phone. Did the woman let nothing go to voice mail? Masking her dismay, Helena asked as offhandedly as possible if she and Christina could drop off the t-shirt "while we're running errands in the city." No need to let Myka know that the errands had yet to be invented. Given how her Saturday was turning out, Helena didn't expect that Myka would suggest another time, preferably far into the future when the irksomeness of having two former girlfriends dating each other would have subsided. Nonetheless, a part of her, the part that would open anyone from sternum to pelvis who didn't think Christina was talented (although Christina herself was to have only a nodding acquaintance with such unqualified maternal devotion) was gratified to hear genuine enthusiasm in Myka's "Drop by anytime. I'm looking forward to seeing her design."

Sometime later – though hardly soon enough for Christina, who stroked the shirt much like a fostered pet she was giving up to its forever home – Helena slowed her car in front of Myka's home. "Car" and "home" might be words that a neutral observer would use to describe her spotless new model BMW SUV and the utter horror Myka lived in, but they would not be her words. She reluctantly stepped down from the front seat and then very, very carefully made sure the SUV was locked and the equally expensive alarm system turned on. Christina was already racing across the "lawn" toward the decrepit porch, and Helena envisioned those barely shod feet slicing themselves open on rusted cans, broken bottles, and, it wouldn't shock her, used syringes. The last was an exaggeration, even she realized it, but the yard was both patchy and overgrown, as if it suffered from mange; the longer she stared at it, the more her skin itched. The true assault upon her senses was the house itself. Its Frankensteinian assemblage of styles was more than a visual affront to good taste, it didn't even seem structurally sound. The second-story tower was so grossly disproportionate –

"I promise, one, that the blindness is only temporary and, two, that the house will hold up for at least another 15 minutes." Myka was on the porch, Christina, clutching the gift-wrapped tee to her chest, all but dancing with excitement next to her.

"Hurry up, Mom," she shouted. "Isn't this the coolest place? And Myka says I can play with the dog."

Here she had thought the outside was the worst of it; inside, she was going to confront dog slobber and dog fur. As Helena picked her way to the porch, Myka, dressed in a varnish- and paint-stained university v-neck and ancient denim cut-offs, grinned at her evilly. That smile, those legs, the riotous hair barely restrained by a clip. How could a mess look so good?

 **Myka**

She and Helena and Tracy were sitting at the kitchen table, and Myka thought about how often she had fantasized about a moment very similar to this one. Years after she and Helena had broken up, even after she was married to Sam, she had pictured Helena gathered to the bosom of her family and their child romping with her/his cousins. There had been many things wrong with that fantasy, not the least of which was why she continued to indulge in fantasies about an ex when she was a happily married woman. Of course the truth was that while she was married she wasn't happily married, and the persistence of the fantasy, to give it its due, was probably the first in a series of clues that she wasn't going to find happiness in a marriage to a man, any man. She had also wondered whether someone as dismissive of convention as Helena would be so easily gathered to the Bering bosom. Warren and Jeannie were descended from generations of sturdy Midwesterners, their greatest strength being their ability to suffer disappointment. They didn't take to the unconventional or the unemployed. Put more plainly, Helena would have needed to come to the door of the Berings' modest two-bedroom home with an accepted job offer in hand and a willingness to sleep on the sofa instead of in the oldest daughter's bed to evoke more than a lukewarm smile of welcome.

Truthfully, the only similarity between that ancient fantasy and this moment was Christina's playing with Remy outside. Because, considering the side-eye Tracy and Helena were giving each other, this Helena, whose strappy sandals, elegant "casual" clothes, and Hope Diamond-esque engagement ring screamed "I'm not to be 'gathered,'" was in no danger of being crushed to Tracy's pregnancy-enhanced bosom. Helena's perfume didn't carry the scent of a rare flower or unique spice provided at great cost in a tiny bottle – although it did – it carried the whiff of domestic spending cuts, tax reform, and the rollback of regulations. How could someone who wouldn't look out of place at a Koch brothers' retreat be so sexy? The scornfully arched right eyebrow, the dismissive glances at her weekend renovation attempts, they fanned Myka's attraction rather than smothered it.

She looked at the shirt in its wrapping beside her. It was clever and surprisingly accomplished, and, though she suspected the design would run the first time she washed it, offered with such pride in its execution that she refused to believe Christina wasn't as much Helena's child on the inside as she was on the outside. Somewhere underneath that one-percenter exterior beat the heart of her Helena, the woman who not only took time to smell the roses but was also open to rolling them like a joint and smoking them.

Yet what did it matter that this glossy woman with her glossy clothes might still harbor some vestige of her underachieving self? She was Nate's Helena now, all of her, and she didn't seem any more inclined to reconsider her choices today than she had that afternoon when she had glided in from the patio to thank "Maddie's mother" for bring her daughter home from summer camp. Myka resolved that if she were going to let her mind wander as Helena and Tracy failed to find anything in common, she would let it wander in the direction of Gigi Fourier, who was both sexy and, miraculously, interested in a mid-level university administrator raising a 'tween child.

"Your sister's new girlfriend introduced us," Helena was saying with a tight little smile that Myka was almost persuaded was a grimace meant for her.

"New girlfriend?" Tracy repeated, confused. Her smile was as pained and accusatory as Helena's as she turned to Myka. "How am I hearing about your new girlfriend from one of your old girlfriends? I ask an innocent question about Helena's fiancé, and I learn you're dating someone."

"I wouldn't call it dating," Myka demurred, suddenly wishing that the box fans she had going in the kitchen (because updating the cooling system in this house wasn't a budget-friendly DIY project) had a speed, and volume, setting called Wind Tunnel. "We've had dinner a couple of times, that's all." The statement was reasonably accurate. She and Gigi had gone out to dinner just twice since the pool party, but the second dinner had ended with them kissing goodnight on the front porch several times, each kiss lasting longer than the preceding one.

"Of course this would be the time that Sam decided to play the responsible father and fly Maddie out for a visit. Who's going to tattle on you, Myka, if not your kid?" Tracy said, chagrined. "Does she know you're seeing-but-not-dating someone?"

"It's too soon to tell her about Gigi." Myka rubbed the back of her neck, dismayed both at the knot her muscles were forming and the amount of sweat that was slicking her skin. "It's too soon to be talking about her, period." She flashed her own tight little smile at Helena. Why had she interjected that completely unnecessary piece of information? The old Helena had loved to tease her, but this had shaded toward the spiteful. Plus the old Helena's teasing had almost always had the purpose of getting her naked and into bed. That didn't appear to be the object here.

"Gigi? As in Leslie Caron? A French coquette?" Tracy squealed incredulously. "The only Gigi I've heard of recently is the mayor's 'spokesperson.'" She crooked her fingers to suggest air quotes. "Does every politician think he has to give the woman he's boinking an official title?" Her snickering trailed off as Myka felt that the heat from her face alone might be enough to immolate the three of them. Or at least fry an egg, if someone wanted to use her forehead instead of a sidewalk in demonstration of just how miserably hot this day had gotten.

"Ohmigod," Tracy said somewhere on the continuum between real and theatrical shock, "that's 'your' Gigi? I know, I know," she switched from making air quotes to crossing her hands like wiper blades in an effort to preempt her sister's weary objection that Gigi wasn't "hers" any more than she was a girlfriend or anything remotely approaching the definition. "You've 'gone out to dinner'?" She was helpless not to italicize any reference to a woman who seemed to give a double meaning to the most innocent of words.

"Yes, _dinner_ ," Myka said with equal emphasis. "I'm not at the stage yet where I have to ask her if she's sleeping with the mayor." Though she knew it was silly because, given the way they had kissed on the porch, she was two dates, max, from having to ask, she wanted to appear stronger and more virtuous than she was. While she might end up another name in Gigi's contact list scheduled for early deletion, she wanted to be the only one to predict her humiliation. So she added, a little loftily, "I may decide that we're not going to get to that stage."

Helena laughed, and Tracy, despite a brave effort not to goggle at her, ultimately failed. "You're going to have to be tied to the mast, darling," Helena said dryly, "because better people than you have washed up on her glorious shores."

"I'll admit that there's a lot I don't know about her, but I'm past the age when a woman with a great smile can get me into her bed simply by telling me that she's been in a waking dream since we met." There had been more to it than that, Myka acknowledged. An illicit late night visit to the rooftop of the science building, a gallant draping of a jacket around her shoulders, eyes as dark as the midnight sky but a million times warmer, hands trembling with fear and excitement both as they cupped and tilted her face for a kiss.

Helena nodded, remembering, but her voice was bland. "I'm sure you are, and for what it's worth, I've come up with better lines since then."

Tracy glanced from one to the other and back again. "I'm sure Gigi's a really nice person, Myka," she said, attempting to broker peace and turn the conversation in a different direction.

The kitchen door slammed open, the screens rattling as Christina raced in, Remy in full, joyous pursuit. "Gigi's great," she enthused. Planting herself in front of Myka, she pushed damp strands of hair from her face and announced, "Remy and I would like more popsicles."

"Please and no, at least for you," Helena said, nose wrinkling at the scent of superheated dog. "We're having lunch downtown, remember?"

Christina's eyes went both wide and blank. "Um, sure, yeah." Myka, with a consoling pat to her shoulder, had gone over to the refrigerator and opened the bottom freezer drawer. "I wanted you to meet Gigi not only 'cause she's my friend, but because you're nice and I thought you could be her friend too." Helena unsuccessfully suppressed a gurgle in her throat and reached for her glass of ice water. "Lots of people want to be her friend, but I don't think she has many." With the hard-won experience of one who has struggled with her own admiring throngs, Christina said, "People are staring at you all the time, but they don't _see_ you. But you, you saw right away that I'm an artist."

Myka had pulled out only one popsicle, a bumpy translucent oblong filled with chunks of zucchini and carrots. Wordlessly she reached back into the drawer and pulled out another one, its cellophane sheath decorated with dancing bunches of grapes. One she gave to Christina, the other she dropped into Remy's bowl, and both were attacked with gusto. Above the slurping sounds, she locked eyes with Helena. "Like your daughter said, there's more to Gigi than meets the eye."

 **Helena**

Helena put a hand to the back of her neck. She had been in the office for less than two hours, and her muscles were as tight and sore as if she had been working for 12. "Working" gave her possibly too much credit. She had read most of her emails, sent some of her correspondents responses, and categorized the rest of the messages as "Reply is not urgent" or "Delete and forget." Most of Charles's emails to her ended up in the latter category. He had sent her yet another message about "attending to Mr. Bradley." She had attended to Aaron, advising him that they had no legal recourse for removing the court records of his "youthful offenses" that were variously summarized, linked, or posted in full. They were public records. His best option was to offer heartfelt apologies for his transgressions and busily employ himself in as many good works as possible. The more pain, suffering, or embarrassment they would cause him the better. Don't only donate money or volunteer at the Special Olympics. If there's a flood in Louisiana, swamp out basements. Go on a hunger strike for a cause. Donate a kidney. Do something that shows you're truly sorry, that you understand what penitence means.

Tell her that you gave up New York for the nation's so-called heartland, yanked your daughter from a pricey, academically-sound-but-educationally-progressive school to plunk her into the intellectual equivalent of a one-room schoolhouse . . . for _her_. Tell her that you gave up your pride for her, that you paced the campus of the university where she worked trying to marshal the explanation for why, after almost 15 years of silence, you tracked her down. It was simple, really. You had tracked her down because nothing had ever felt as right or as good as those few months you had had together. Only eight of them compared to the 180 the two of you had been apart, but you could remember virtually every minute of every day of those eight months whereas those 180 months sometimes seemed 180 years, tedious, forgettable. There had been lovers, many lovers, since her but not one had eclipsed her.

Helena closed her eyes. Her neck still hurt. Aaron Bradley wasn't hoping to win back the love of his life. He wanted a television network to offer him a job . . . as anything. Besides, she didn't believe in rubbish such as an eternal love or a once-in-a-lifetime love. She had thought her parents had permanently disillusioned her, but Myka was both the proof of and the remedy to her lapse. After having thoroughly walked the campus, twice, and composed a succinct but heartfelt speech ("I've thought about you every day of every year since we split up, and I can't bear not seeing your sweet, beautiful face for every day that remains to us"), she had seen Myka leave the administration building. She had started to run on the snowy, icy sidewalks to intercept her, trying to call out her name, but Myka had turned at another's voice and hugged and soundly kissed another woman, that sweet, beautiful face alight for _her_. There had been no hesitation in that greeting, no reserve in that kiss. Myka might have spent the past 179 months missing Helena Wells terribly but not the 180th.

All that had happened three years ago, Helena reminded herself, and her life had changed. She was not the same woman who had anxiously waited for Myka to emerge from a citadel to higher education bureaucracy and inefficiency. She had successfully expanded Future Image's footprint (although 90% of her work remained centered in New York or Los Angeles), she was raising a daughter who had a keen appreciation of the arts and good business sense (Christina had had the foresight, at least, to charge Myka for her work), and she was very, very soon to marry (once she could get Nate to focus on setting a date) an industry giant and – it was no great exaggeration to say – future political leader. She _was_ happy, damnit.

Christina raised her head as if the outraged cry of happiness had been shouted. She dropped her head back over her phone, on which she had been reading, with greater diligence than Helena had seen her devote to anything other than drawing or painting, articles with titles like "What's the Perfect Dog for You?" and "Ten Best Dog Breeds for Families." She supposed that in the not-too-distant future, most likely as tit for the tat of agreeing to take part in the wedding, Christina would demand that they get a dog. Helena more closely observed her daughter. Christina had borne with remarkable fortitude the news that her new "best friend" was visiting her father for two weeks, only lifting a shoulder at Myka's apologies for Maddie's absence and then asking, as if Maddie weren't merely away but banished forever, "Can Remy come stay with me?"

Whatever those two had cooked up together to move their immovable mothers closer together wasn't likely to withstand Gigi's irresistible force. Even at a remove, Gigi's power of attraction was strong enough to captivate Myka's sister, a lesser version of Myka in every way, Helena had decided, including her probable location at the very bottom of the heterosexual end of the spectrum. However, she was willing to admit that her assessment might have been influenced by the faint air of disapproval Tracy had assumed every time she had looked at or spoken to her. Tracy's nose was sharper, her chin was sharper than her sister's, and they had seemed to thin to an accusatory point whenever Tracy had turned her face to her. You broke her heart. You abandoned her. That was what the chin and nose were saying at the same time that Tracy was asking her something as neutral as "How did you meet your fiancé?" But had it been neutral? Hadn't Tracy lingered a little too long on "fiancé," as if to imply "You're willing to commit to a man whose net worth dwarfs the combined net worth of the residents of this state, aren't you?" In Tracy's mind, it probably didn't matter that Gigi was the mayor's . . . whatever. She wasn't the one who had dumped her big sister. But it wasn't like that, Helena began to argue in her own defense, you weren't there . . . .

With a slam that had probably just cracked the screen of her laptop, Helena said abruptly, "Let's go. We'll visit a few shops and then we'll have dinner in town. How does that sound?"

Christina once more looked up from her phone, not a little warily. "Visit a few shops for what?"

How she loved to delight her daughter. "New clothes for school." And how she loved to torment her. "We'll look at wedding dresses, too. Before we know it, I'll be Mrs. Nathan Robinson."

"Better make sure you remind him. Sometimes I think he forgets we live in his house."

Christina never failed to get her own back. She was her daughter, after all. Yet, at the moment, Helena could have wished for a little more Bianchi in her and a little less Wells.

 **Myka**

What had that been all about? Why had Helena jabbed at her about her resistance, or lack thereof, to Gigi's attractions? And why had she, in turn, made that passive-aggressive dig about being too old for cheesy lines? When you're 21, there are only cheesy lines, and when you're 21, you're also too horny to care. She stepped back from the wall she had been stripping of decades' worth, perhaps centuries' worth, of wallpaper, and instinctively looked for Tracy, but Tracy had long since left. She knew it was selfish – and she would adore Baby McKelvey when he or she was born – but she missed her sounding board; between the stockpiles of chemicals for the renovation projects and the lack of air conditioning, Tracy had had to flee for the pregnancy-accommodating comforts of her home.

If she wanted to talk over the strangely tense encounter with Helena or her blossoming "thing" with Gigi, her only immediate recourse was Remy, who was sprawled on the floor contentedly gnawing a flip-flop poached from the hall closet and which she was too hot and too preoccupied with other matters, frankly, to take from her. If she had to take Remy to the emergency vet because a chunk of the flip-flop ended up obstructing her bowel, so be it. Myka pointed the scraper at her, much as she might a laser pen to highlight a key word during a meeting, "endowments," for example, on a PowerPoint slide, asking, "What did you make of Helena?" Remy looked up at her, cocking her head and thumping her tail. Myka scowled at her. "Don't give me the bright eyes. She cringed every time you came within two feet of her. You're mistaking her for Christina." Remy was just hopeful that the sudden attention was a precursor to a treat, Myka knew. Had she said, "How about a bath, Remy?," Remy would have given her the same gaze of utter devotion, calculated to soften the hardest heart into offering her something better than a flip-flop. God, even the dog had an agenda.

If she needed to brood over the inexplicable and the ungovernable, it didn't have to wear the face of Helena Wells, it could just as easily display the ruddy cheeks and disarming blue eyes of Sam Martino. Unlike Helena's eyes, Sam's weren't simply windows to his soul, they were French doors flung wide. Try to get those eyes to steadily meet your own, however, and you would discover how elusive Sam could be. After months of no more than phone calls and an occasional meal with his daughter when he happened to be passing through town on his way to an alumni event, Sam had invited Maddie to spend a couple of weeks with him at his home in Florida. He had found yet another university that believed his perpetual aura of former jock and Business Administration major, married to a knack for instantly making friends, was the key to increasing alumni support. For the past 20 years, he had successfully sustained the illusion that he had only just graduated, though his hair was thinning and his waistline was beginning to attest to the consequences of holding alumni get-togethers at bars and microbreweries.

Was he remembering to feed her? Maddie wasn't a houseplant that he could water occasionally and forget. She could also get so engrossed in a book that she would stay up all night, if no one took the Kindle or tablet out of her hand, to finish it. Was he making sure she was getting enough sleep? Lately Maddie had been worrying that she wouldn't be a competitive enough candidate to get into the college of her choice. Was he reassuring her that, yes, she would have the academic pedigree sufficient to someday replace RBG on the bench? Myka had talked with her a few days ago, and Maddie had seemed muted but quick to reassure her mother that she was having a wonderful time. Her dad was taking her to Disneyworld . . . again. "He thinks I haven't gone on enough rides," she had said in a tone that suggested her "fun" quota had been more than met, but that her father's, perhaps, hadn't.

Myka's scraper encountered something that might have been wood just as she heard a voice tentatively call out, "Myka?" She didn't need to see Remy whine anxiously and search for somewhere to hide to know what other past mistake had shown up in her kitchen. "I'm in the dining room, Michelle."

Michelle hovered just inside the doorway, gauging the progress that had been made and tactfully keeping her evaluation to herself. Myka knew the room looked awful; with the exception of the one she was working on, the walls were covered in a flocked wallpaper that must have been put on in the '70s, the original hardwood of the floor was stained and even splintered in places from years of student keggers, the wainscoting was scored and gouged, the window frames were so warped that water leaked through the gaps between wood and wall every time it rained. Michelle hadn't shared her interest in renovation, particularly when it came to restoring this old Victorian; at some point during a visit, she would coolly survey whichever room they were in, looking past the disrepair to its former glory, and darkly wonder, "How many men and women labored for pennies a day in a factory or grain mill to build some robber baron his dream home?"

Said robber baron had, in fact, owned several grain mills and was one of the founders of a cereal company that more than a century later had become a global food company. So Michelle had a point. Yet the same robber baron had, at his death, directed in his will that the house was to become a home for unwed mothers, "in which they can deliver and nurture their babes without shame and without want." People had speculated at the time that he had made the bequest because of his own uncertain origins, having been famously left in a basket as an infant on the steps of a church. Eventually the trust he had set up to fund the home was dissolved, and the house had gone to a distant relative. But for 25 years, there had been at least one place in the city at the turn of the century that had been less benighted than others. The information had done little to soften Michelle's opinion and, if Myka remembered correctly (which, of course, she did), their heated discussion had quickly found a different avenue of expression in her bedroom.

Looking at Michelle now, Myka didn't find it hard to remember what things had been like between them – the first time. She found it hard to re-experience the emotions. All of it was gone, except the admiration. Michelle had been what Myka thought she herself should be. If Michelle deemed the cause worthy, she wholly committed herself to it – fundraising, marches, phone calls to their congressmen. Because of her, Myka contributed more, volunteered more, expressed her opinions more confidently. Everyone made the mistake of thinking that because they were the same age, shared the same coloring and build, they were alike, but they weren't. Michelle couldn't spare the time for ambiguity or ambivalence; there was too much about the world that was wrong to indulge in them. Myka sometimes felt that ambiguity and ambivalence were her world. How else could she have loved her father except by acknowledging that as crabbed a life as he had lived – and forced his wife and daughters to live as well – it had harbored his dream of becoming a famous writer? They had both sought refuge in books, she to escape his anger and depression, he to escape his failures to become a success at anything. He had been a teacher, salesman, bookkeeper, security guard, and custodian before finally taking over a decrepit bookstore. Every one of them had worked in the bookstore and taken other jobs too in order to keep the debt collectors away, and she couldn't ever once remember him saying to her "I'm sorry" or "Thank you." Still, she had loved him. What was there to "do" or legislate about such a muddled mix of affection and resentment?

"You're looking pensive. Did I come at a bad time?"

"No." She held up her hand as Michelle seemed about to venture farther into the room. "Remy's been with me and there are chemicals all over the place. I don't want you taking any of it back to Ethan."

"Gwen has him this weekend." Michelle's smile was uncharacteristically diffident. "We're finally at a good place, Gwen and me, about Ethan, about what we are to each other now. I feel like I'm ready to move on in a way I wasn't before."

Myka fiddled with her scraper, uneasily sensing that Michelle's words were only a prologue to something she was pretty sure she was no longer interested in hearing. Tracy had once said about Michelle that she had no trouble committing to causes, she had trouble committing to people. But that was another thing many got wrong about Michelle. She had been deeply committed to Gwen, long past the end of Gwen's commitment to her. If she had to be honest, and Myka thought that in a very few minutes she was going to have to be brutally honest with Michelle, so why not start with herself? Perhaps even more attractive than Michelle's devotion to making the world a better place was her continued devotion to a woman who maintained that she didn't want it (but who never failed to play on it, Myka thought cynically). Whereas some, like Tracy, saw a doormat, Myka saw a rock. It was indestructible, irreducible, Michelle's fidelity. It demonstrated an understanding of commitment that none of Myka's other lovers had had.

All the same, maybe that fidelity was so attractive precisely because it hadn't been directed at her. Because, despite the headiness of the first few months of their first stab at a relationship, all the fieriness that Michelle's commitment seemed to promise actually failed to light a fire in, um, certain areas. Novelty could disguise only so much and what should have been enriching and ardent like some of their other experiences together (sleeping in a cardboard box for several days to protest the inadequacy, in number and services, of the city's homeless shelters, for instance) simply wasn't. Myka remembered a blustery January day, when she had been looking at the clock and counting down the minutes until she could meet Michelle for lunch. Unable to wait any longer, at such a pitch to see her that she had rushed out of the administration building's doors, she had heard a voice intoning (like a bad special effect in a 1950s sci-fi movie), "This one is not for you." The only person around had been a woman with long, dark hair walking rapidly in the opposite direction. There was no voice, fate wasn't whispering in her ear, it had been nothing more than her own anxieties about the course of a new relationship. And yet . . . .

" . . . I haven't heard from you since you and I and Ethan went to the movies," Michelle was saying plaintively. "I know with Maddie back you've been busy, but I was hoping that we could get together again, just the two of us. Dinner, possibly?"

Myka tried to steadily regard that face, which, despite having green eyes and being framed by an even wilder mass of brown waves, looked nothing like her own. Michelle's features were stronger, less blurred and softened than hers by a willingness to compromise. That mouth was rarely tremulous. "I don't think there's a 'third time is the charm' for us." For a moment, she was tempted to say she was seeing someone, which was true but which, if she used it, would also be a disservice, to Michelle, who deserved as much honesty as Myka could bear to deliver, and even more so to this new whatever-it-was with Gigi. She didn't know that it had a future, but she didn't want to blemish it at the outset by making their dates seem more significant than they were. "I want to be your friend, and I want to see you happy, but I don't see a relationship between us anymore."

Michelle nodded, disappointed. "It's too soon, isn't it? You need to see that I'm truly over Gwen." Her features firmed with a resolve that Myka had come to know all too well. "I can be patient. Capitalism hasn't collapsed under the weight of its injustice, not yet, but I'm still waiting, still hoping. I'm here for the long haul, Myka."

Myka knew that she hadn't been honest enough, but she couldn't bring herself to say the words. I don't love you enough to try again. I never did. She knew it was less cruel to own to her less than sterling devotion and commitment than to let Michelle have hopes that maybe, possibly someday if only . . . . But she watched Michelle leave wearing a much more confident smile, and, for the first time that she could remember (and, of course, she knew it was the first time), she felt a little sorry for Gwen.

 **Helena**

Christina picked at her pasta, more interested in the passers-by outside the partition that separated the restaurant's patio from the sidewalk. The city's downtown, its blandness and homogeneity always an affront to Helena, had become more diverse, in all senses of the word, in recent years. Street performers, sometimes in competition, sometimes in impromptu harmony, played on the corners, and people were window-shopping, pushing strollers, or simply taking in a late summer evening redolent of barbecue and warmed concrete, twilight indistinct from the haze of heat and car exhaust. Helena would have preferred to eat in the restaurant's air-conditioned interior, but Christina had clamored for a table on the patio. Taking into Christina's account that they had spent the last two hours shopping for a dress and shoes to match, Helena had indulged her. She automatically glanced over the side of her chair at the shopping bag. It held the shoes, not the dress. The dress would be delivered to the house next week once the tailoring was finished. Not a wedding dress – her ability to torment her daughter by oohing and ahhing over wedding dresses was limited because, in addition to the fact that she wasn't fond of white or lace or trains, her wedding dress wouldn't be off the rack. It would be an event for an event.

Nate might not be a celebrity and the wedding would be his second, but his name carried more weight than that of George Clooney (at least in certain circles) and, consequently, this wedding would be far more newsworthy than his first. Twenty years ago, he had been the president of a little known ethanol company; now he was CEO of a colossus that processed corn into everything from ethanol to cornflakes. He wanted the wedding to be small and quiet, but small and quiet on his scale was larger and more opulent than most people could afford, and his bride would *not* be wearing a dress bought from Bridal Bonanza.

The dress she had bought today was for a production far less grand than her wedding. That was how she saw it, although she wasn't sure she could say the same for Nate. Every September he hosted a charity "supper" at his home, simultaneously mocking and elevating the potlucks and church suppers of his youth by hiring the staff, including, of course, the chef, of the latest exclusive restaurant to catch his fancy to cater it. A multiple-course meal served on Chinet accompanied by wines poured into Solo cups. There was music, performers flying in from New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville, with the exception of the polka band that Nate invited every year who drove down in a mini-van from a little town brushing the Canadian border. At the end of the supper but before the polka band was brought on to start the music for dancing, Nate would gather the businessmen (and they were almost exclusively men) whom he had invited to join him in his latest philanthropic venture and announce the particular charity that they would be actively supporting and promoting for the next year. Then, amidst all the clapping, he would hold his hand out to Helena, and she would join him, smiling brilliantly, in a lead-off polka, the 75-year-old accordion player leering at her as they hopped and skipped across the terrace.

Nate didn't neglect his other charitable efforts, he remained on the same boards and attended the same galas and auctions, but the charity he announced at the supper was the one he would mention during every interview, yoke together with cereals and fast food burgers and actresses hawking rejuvenating body lotions (because there was hardly a product or a business line, Helena had learned, that didn't rely on corn in some way), and blazon its name across everything from pro-am golf tournaments to the visor and polo shirt he would wear when he presented the winner with his trophy.

It wasn't a jeans and t-shirt affair. Any guest showing up in jeans and a t-shirt would most likely be directed to the cleaning detail that would eliminate all evidence of the supper from the house and grounds by early the following morning. However, it also wasn't white tie – not technically – although guests frequently dusted off their formal wear for the occasion. Nate would usually dress "down" with a blazer and button-down shirt, while she was expected to find something suitable at Nordstrom's or the equivalent, preferably from the clearance racks. It's just a supper, he would chide her. While the planning and the organizing of the event was largely left up to an event planner, his fussiness about even small details gave the lie to his "just a supper" nonchalance, and Helena, at the height of her irritation with him, would wonder why he didn't invite his hometown to the supper – the entire population would fit comfortably within the bounds of his property. Nate was gesturing at his roots only to demonstrate how far he had traveled from them.

Christina was looking expectantly at her. "CanwegetdessertandbringsometoMyka?"

Helena stared meaningfully at the large portion of chicken alfredo still on her daughter's plate. Somehow Christina still labored under the delusion that speaking rapidly would so blister her mother with its machine-gun-like force that she wouldn't notice whatever it was she wasn't supposed to notice. "We'll talk at greater length about all the reasons that it's not a good idea, but let me say now that it's a waste of money. Myka doesn't like sugar."

"She doesn't think sugar's good for you, it's not that she doesn't like sugar. There's a difference." As if Helena were being backward about picking up on the implications, Christina added, "She'll pretend that she doesn't want any of it, but she really will want it, and if we say we waited until we could eat it with her, she'll have some."

Christina didn't strongly resemble her father, but she had his eyes, a deep chocolate brown, which, right now, had a thoroughly un-Bianchi-like calculating cast to them. "You just want more time with Remy," Helena accused her.

Christina shrugged, not bothering to deny it. Helena wasn't sure which she felt more, pride that an 11-year-old could be so shrewd or dismay that an 11-year-old could be so shrewd. She should put an end to the discussion, pay the bill, and drive them home. That's what a good mother would do. Actually, a good mother would insist that her daughter go to bed at a reasonable hour once they were home, but Helena knew she would more than likely retreat to the family room (one of the family rooms, she corrected herself) with a glass of wine and let Christina wreak whatever havoc she wanted on the upstairs. But a part of her wanted to see Myka again, she felt she had left the field of battle (i.e., Myka's kitchen) at a tactical disadvantage. She didn't care that Myka and Gigi were dating; in fact, Myka and Gigi could elope, and she would barely lift an eyebrow at the news. She was engaged, she was happy, she would look sumptuous at the charity supper, so sumptuous in fact that Nate would be helpless to do anything at the end of it but set a wedding date. She had only to make Myka see how happy she was. Realizing that something was wrong at the heart of her reasoning but unable to divine what it was, Helena said, in admonishing surrender but surrender nonetheless, "We'll stop by, but only for a minute."

 **Myka**

It had never felt this good, ever. She had suspected that Gigi's soft, strong hands might be her undoing, but not like this. Myka let out another long groan . . . and blushed. If her neighbors should hear her, but, thankfully, she lived on a corner lot, and it was only a shoulder massage. A shoulder massage while she was pinioned between Gigi's soft, strong thighs – this was foreplay, and Gigi's laugh at the end of Myka's groan signaled that she was fully aware of it. When Gigi had shown up at her door earlier in the evening, bearing bags of take-out and wearing faded shorts and an old polo shirt - "Thought you might be ready for a break, and I'll be happy to pitch in . . . spackling, staining" – Myka had thought she was in a reversal of _A Christmas Carol_ , in which, out of the three girlfriends past, present, and future who had shown up at her door, the girlfriend Yet to Come was the harbinger of her greatest happiness. She wasn't being punished for her mistakes but recompensed. She hadn't hesitated; she had joined Gigi on the porch, taking the bags from her hands and giving her a long, grateful kiss. Gigi had looked a little nonplussed afterwards, one hand flying to her lips, those silver eyes blinking in bemusement. "I was hoping you had missed me, but . . . ."

Gigi had been in Arizona for the past several days, combining a trip to visit her mother with a scouting expedition to determine the level of support for the mayor's possible run for governor among some of the richest and most influential of the state's snowbirds. Many observed the migratory ritual more in adaptation (if not outright breach) of the six-month rule, limiting their stays north to the minimum number of days necessary to keep their home state their state of legal residence. As they sampled a variety of appetizers that Gigi had brought from one of the city's trendiest cafes – and, not coincidentally, one of Larry Jenkins's favorite places to see and be seen – Myka had listened with one ear to Gigi's wry stories about her mother – a woman whose greatest achievements were her eight-stroke handicap and perpetual tan ("Put her next to a piece of petrified wood and I'll dare you to tell me who's better preserved," Gigi said, not without admiration) – and with another to the faint echo of Tracy's "woman he's boinking."

Gigi had stopped mid-story. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Myka had said hurriedly. "I guess I'm a little sore from all the scraping today."

"I have the cure for that."

Granted, she had half-expected something else, but this massage was . . . incredible. It was as though Gigi's fingers had eyes, identifying and then working every sore spot in her neck, shoulders, and back. They were sitting in the parlor that Myka, with some success, had transformed into a contemporary family room. The original hardwood of the floor had been sanded and refinished and the walls had been successfully scraped clean and painted. The fireplace was in working order, and the large area rug had a pile thick enough to blunt the unaccommodating surface of the floor. Gigi was resting her back against the front of the sofa, while Myka was resting against Gigi. She reached up for Gigi's arms and drew them down around her waist. This, like the massage, felt wonderful, too.

Then why were these words coming out of her mouth? "Are you sleeping with the mayor?"

Gigi didn't tense, didn't flinch, didn't drop her arms. Instead she kissed the back of Myka's neck, and Myka fought not to squirm, both from the fact that she knew how much sweat her skin had produced over the past several hours and from the pleasure of the touch. "No, I'm not sleeping with Larry. My relationship with him is complicated, but it's never been complicated in that way."

Myka hung her head, believing that her neck didn't deserve to be kissed like that. Acting like a jealous girlfriend when she wasn't Gigi's girlfriend, she had likely, with that stupid question, given up any chance to be Gigi's girlfriend. "I'm sorry. It was none of my business."

"I want it to be your business. I want you to care about whether I'm with someone right now." Those lips unerringly found her neck again. "I'm not. I don't date much." Myka's head shot back in such shock that she thought she might have clipped Gigi on the jaw, but, apparently used to reactions of utter amazement, Gigi deftly avoided the missile that was Myka's head by swooping in and gently biting the side of Myka's neck. "It's true. I let people think what they will because it's generally worked to my advantage. But I'm pretty choosy."

Myka sat up straighter, twisting around to face her. "You have to admit, even if you're not sleeping with Larry Jenkins, it's kind of strange that we've both slept with Helena."

Gigi smiled. "I don't think it's strange. What I had with Helena, and what I think we could have together are two different things. There wasn't a whole lot of emotion with Helena," she paused, adding sheepishly, "although that's not to say there weren't . . . um . . . other urges. But with you," she took a breath and displayed in the sudden, almost liquid roll of her eyes a hint of anxiety, "there's everything, or at least there might be, if we're lucky. I want to choose you, Myka, if you'll let me."

Myka felt all the parts of her body begin to pound, her heart being only one among them. "What do you mean, exactly?"

"That I want to get to know you more, that I want to make the first time between us special. Don't get me wrong – I've never wanted to give a naked massage to someone so badly in my life, but I want you to be sure of me, and I need to a little surer of you." Gigi's eyes didn't harbor the dark wonder of the universe in them, but Myka remembered looking up at the moon as a child and wishing she could walk on it. Gigi's eyes invited her to take her first step. "Nate Robinson will be hosting a charity event in a couple of weeks. Usually I go as Larry's 'date,' but I want to let him go stag this year. I want to take you. I want people to see us together, to see that you're the one I'm with. I know, I know, people say that Nate Robinson is an evil genius who's despoiling the state by turning it into a huge cornfield. It also means seeing Helena, seeing me and Helena, but you've got more money and power in that house than most countries could claim. It's a networking opportunity, Myka. A lot of CEOs will be there who can help out the university, and I'll make sure –"

She didn't get a chance to finish because Myka sealed her mouth with her own. The ghosts of Past and Present who had visited her today had rattled their chains, but Yet to Come was here, and she was in her lap.

 **Helena**

She had recognized the car in the driveway, but Christina was out of their SUV before she could stop her, carrying three slices of Bird of Paradise cake carefully packaged as if she were carrying frankincense or myrrh and Remy was the baby in the stable. Then just as quickly Christina was flying back down from the porch, the cake forgotten, and she wrenched open the door, saying so bitterly "Go, let's just go, Mom," that Helena fumbled at the gear stick in surprise. They backed out of the driveway as the porch lights were coming on, and Helena wondered what Myka – and Gigi – would make of the container of cake on the porch. A rather garishly frosted cake – blue and orange in fidelity to its name – with chunks of pineapple, mango, and papaya baked into the batter; not a dessert she would have chosen, but what else could she expect when she let a child choose the dessert and . . . . Helena inhaled a long, steadying breath. Never mind that she was rattled, she needed to comfort her daughter. They had already had "the conversation," but it was one thing to hear about an act when it was strategically euphemized and described in glowingly romantic terms and quite another to witness it.

"Darling, I'm sorry you had to see that, but sometimes adults, when they're carried away, they don't think about who might 'happen upon them,' as it were –" Helena recognized that she was adopting the diction – and shrinking, ladylike tone – of a Victorian grandmother, but this was the last thing she was expecting to have to talk about with Christina tonight.

"They weren't having sex, Mom. They were still wearing clothes," Christina cut her off coldly. "But they were kissing," she said with utter contempt, "and Gigi had this . . . this gooey look on her face."

Gooey . . . . Gigi? Helena convulsively swallowed and gripped the steering wheel tighter. Oh, dear, this could be horrid, the Victorian grandmother in her said.

"We had a deal, Gigi and me," Christina said in an icy fury that sounded familiar to Helena, "and she broke it."

Then Helena realized where she had heard such fury before. It was how she sounded when a client, against her wishes and what they had explicitly agreed upon, struck out on his own. Her anger was only temporary, while his regret for his rashness would last forever.


	7. Chapter 7

_The Whole Thing Was a Shambles. Now You Happy?_

 **Maddie**

What was Christina shouting about? The texts came in bursts, sometimes three or four at a time; there would be silence, relatively speaking, and then another three or four, beginning and ending with a series of exclamation points. It reminded Maddie of the brief but intense rain showers that seemed to be a daily event in Florida.

!I THOUGHT SHE WAS MY FRIEND!

!HOW CAN YOU BE GONE? WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK? WE HAVE TO PLAN!

!THIS SUCKS!

Those had been the first, and they had popped like big, fat drops of rain, much like the actual rain on her phone's screen, as she had followed Nana and Poppa Martino into the house. They were regularly taking her grocery shopping, appalled by what their son thought was nutritious for a child: Frosted Flakes, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, microwave popcorn, Totino's Pizza Rolls, Hot Pockets, Kraft Mac and Cheese. While her grandparents unloaded groceries, Maddie had tried to calm Christina down, relying on the earnest reassurances that her mother used with her. However, typing responses like "Things have a way of working themselves out" and "Nothing is ever as bad as it seems" only agitated Christina the more; plus, Maddie admitted, they looked lame, and the only reason they hadn't sounded lame was because of the way her mother said them. She turned them into implicit guarantees, each cliché transformed by a silent "I promise." Maddie couldn't do that in a text, first of all because Christina was probably crazy enough to try to sue her if things didn't work out or turned out to be as bad as they seemed, and second, because sincerity was really hard to get across in a text, unless you used emojis or a bunch of extraneous punctuation marks, and she refused to do either. She wasn't a little kid who needed to use the equivalent of stickers. Third, it was hard to know what to text when you didn't know what was going on. Who was "she?" Hadn't they been planning all along? What "this" was sucking now?

Until she started getting the texts, she hadn't been all that keen on Orlando. Her dad thought she would love the theme parks – he did – but she didn't need Hogwarts or Star Wars turned into stomach-churning rides. Even though he had taken time off during the two weeks of her stay, there were still fundraising events for UCF that he had to attend, so she spent more than one evening being babysat by his latest girlfriend, Rhonda, or her grandparents. The best thing about visiting her dad had been anticipating the return home. When she got back, she would be helping Pete's Soccer Sprouts, which meant there would be a better than even chance that she would get to see J.P. There was something about being more than a thousand miles from home in what looked, smelled, and felt like a different country that lent itself to daydreams in which he prominently figured, impressed by how good she was with the Spouts and turned into a stammering, blushing mess at how tall and pretty she had become over the summer. When the texts started coming, J.P. began to fade in her mind, despite her scrabbling to hold onto him, replaced by the outraged face of Christina. _That_ was what was waiting for her when she got back.

Over the next several days, Christina's barrages - !YOU'RE NOT HERE! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!, !THINGS ARE HORRIBLE!—were just as impatient and demanding, but interspersed among the accusations of indifference and the occasional insult (!HAS THE HEAT FRIED YOUR BRAIN!, !OUR LIVES ARE AT STAKE!) were pleading messages, decorated with hearts and puppy dog emojis, about Remy. !SHE'S THE BEST DOG EVER, CAN WE TIME SHARE HER! Maddie thought about sending a reply that asked !WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME ABOUT SHARING REMY IF OUR LIVES ARE AT STAKE?! but decided that logic would only send Christina into a greater frenzy. Despite the fact that Orlando was daily becoming more appealing compared to home, Maddie found the challenge of making sense of Christina's rants, well, challenging in a way that her other vacation activities weren't. She couldn't daydream about J.P. all day, and there were only so many tales about plucky young women surviving apocalypses that she could read. She loved her dad, she really did; the thrown-together-at-the-last-minute quality of his life, his setting a carton of orange juice and a box of Fruity Pebbles in front of her as he ran to make a meeting that he had forgotten to reschedule, was refreshing in its unBeringness, but it didn't make him the best conversationalist. If she wanted to talk about the impact of global warming on Florida's fragile ecosystems, she needed to find someone else.

Poppa Martino loved to talk, about sports, especially golf; the economy, which would be even better if the government quit giving hand-outs to "bums"; and the threat that the encroaching hordes of tourists, illegal immigrants, and "old farts from the North" posed to his otherwise blissful retirement. That Poppa himself was a recent Midwestern transplant he overlooked, declaring when he was pressed on the inherent contradiction in his railing against the old farts from the North that he was a born Floridian, if only in spirit for the first 65 years of his life. Maddie had a fairly good idea that he wouldn't share her concern about rising sea levels and the disappearance of the wetlands; in fact, Poppa would probably view turtles and manatees as yet more "bums" that the government believed it had to protect.

Nonna was more of a doer. While she golfed with Poppa nearly every day, she would leave him in the course lounge to play cards with her girlfriends, to shop for bargains, to attend her "Senior Spirit" exercise class, to volunteer at a nursing home. ("Good karma for when your grandfather and I are stuck in wheelchairs with no one to visit us," she had told Maddie with the feigned stoicism of someone seeking sympathy. Of course Maddie had to hug her then and pledge, "I'll come down to see you, Nonna." How could she not?) Unlike Poppa, she would listen without interrupting or hijacking the conversation, but then she would also pat Maddie's hand and say, "You're so like your mother, worrying about what can't be changed" and brightly suggest that they make chocolate chip cookies.

There was Sophie, but Sophie's mom had enrolled her in an intensive instruction language class to learn Chinese, the universal business language of the future, Dr. Levinson claimed. Sophie had real homework; she didn't spend her time in class making necklaces out of nuts and dried berries. But it wasn't only homework that had slowed the frequency with which Sophie texted and emailed her, Sophie had made a new friend in class, Julia Cho. Sophie bubbled over with information about her in every message, how Julia's "crazy" Korean/Chinese/Portuguese/Dutch family welcomed her as one of their own, how Korean barbecue would be followed by Dutch letters for dessert, how Abigail Cho was the coolest mom ever, how she and Julia would argue about which of them would make the best Rey (if _The Force Awakens_ were cast in middle school). Sophie went to a sort-of camp and got Julia as a friend; she went and got !WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING NOW TO STOP THIS!. Even thoughts of J.P. weren't solace for the possibility that by the time Maddie returned to her boring old Bering life – which couldn't compare with the Cho allure - Christina, by default, would be her closest friend.

So Maddie treated Christina's texts like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Taken individually, they made no sense, but if you put them together, you could see a picture begin to form. It wasn't the one that Maddie was expecting; it was beginning to resemble Gigi, Christina's and Helena's friend. She remembered her from the pool party, a statuesque woman, Maddie's grandparents would have called her, striding, like a model on a runway, out to the pool where her mom was ineffectually refereeing. "Statuesque" had Maddie envisioning Gigi and her mom at a patio table, Gigi's arm lifted high, holding a torch. It hadn't happened like that of course. Her mom and Gigi had talked like any two normal women, not a woman and the Statue of Liberty, but the image made it hard for Maddie to take Gigi and her mother as an item very seriously, not when a flaming torch would always come between them. Were Gigi and her mom dating? Was that what Christina's ranting and raving was about?

Her mom could be dating Gigi and waiting to see if Gigi made it through the probationary period before telling her. Her mom joked (but not really) that the women she dated had to fill out a questionnaire, pass an exam, and complete Bering basic training before she would let them meet her daughter. Myka Bering was cautious by nature, and she wasn't one to rush an introduction to her family. Sometimes her mom would get the same gooey-eyed look Maddie would see in her baby pictures, and she would want to squirm away and hug her mom at the same time when Myka said things like "It's going to have to be a pretty special woman to meet my pretty special girl." Michelle had been the only one to make the cut so far, and while it was possible that Gigi might fail the exam or collapse during basic training, Christina's outrage seemed a pretty fair indicator that she might be the second woman to share meals and TV nights with Madeleine Jean Martino.

Maddie wasn't sure how she felt about it. On the one hand, Gigi meant there would be no return of Michelle, and that was what she wanted, right? That had been her reason for entering into this crazy pact with Christina. She hadn't really cared whether her mom and Helena would resume their old relationship; she had planned to worry about that later, once Michelle was gone. What did it matter if Gigi, and not Helena, was the one to shoo Michelle away? Granted, Christina was still stuck with Nate, but maybe they could hit on another idea for splitting him and Helena up, and if they couldn't, he wasn't that horrible, was he?

Maddie abstractedly poured more Cocoa Puffs into her bowl. Not too many more days of this and then she would be back to raisin bran and shredded wheat, although her mom relented enough to allow her to get frosted shredded wheat. Her dad sat across the breakfast bar from her with his own bowl of Cocoa Puffs. He was scrolling through sports scores on his phone as he ate. They were going to drive to the coast and spend the weekend at Rhonda's parents' beach house – her mom would have needed to have dated Rhonda for _forever_ before she would do something like that. Her dad and Rhonda had been dating for three months, although her dad always said it as a question, expecting to be corrected. Rhonda would shrug and say, "Close enough." As her father bent his head over his cereal bowl, Maddie could see his bald spot. Impulsively she leaned over the breakfast bar and kissed his head. The mystery of how her parents had stayed together for as long as they had only deepened the older she grew.

Her mom wouldn't have had a grueling performance test in place when she met Sam Martino; like Maddie herself, the thought of it wouldn't even have entered her mind, not then. As Sam looked up from his Puffs to give Maddie a disarming grin, she realized that while he would never pass such a test today, some 13 years ago, her mom might have waived the obstacle course and the endurance run had they existed. For a dad, and an old one at that, he was pretty cute. Helena's smile was different, teasing rather than cheery, but Maddie suspected that it too would have made up for some smart-alecky answers on the (nonexistent) questionnaire. Recalling Helena's smile and how she had nonchalantly taken a seat on an artwork in the sculpture garden, Maddie unexpectedly felt a pang at the realization that this might be the end for the silly plan that she and Christina had concocted. She wouldn't likely have a chance to know Helena any better than she knew her now, and that made her sad in a way she hadn't anticipated. Helena had, no, not pep – which was even more of an old person's word – she had spirit; she had spirit and daring. Compared to a Bering, Helena was a rule-bender, and maybe that was what a certain Bering needed. Her mom didn't need someone who passed her test, she needed someone who would throw it away instead. Helena didn't go around breaking rules all the time, though; she could be nice, too. She had talked with her and Sophie at the pool party, about the book they were reading together and books in general, and when the conversation turned to the Supreme Court, which, to Maddie's mind, was a natural direction for any conversation to take, Helena had said she admired RBG's sardonic wit. She had even made Sophie giggle, a tiny, tiny bit. Would Gigi be able to do all that?

"I'm going to finish packing my bag," Maddie told her father. She had packed it last night, but he wouldn't know that.

"Good idea, we'll need to get on the road soon." Her dad lifted his cereal bowl and started drinking the chocolate milk. "Don't forget to bring sunscreen."

Like she hadn't been in Florida for the past ten days. "On my list, Dad."

In her bedroom, she stared at her phone. She had been spending the past few days trying to get Christina calmed down. Did she really want her to get wound up again? Sighing, she started typing a text in the primitive code they had devised toward the end of camp to frustrate their mothers' surveillance, which wouldn't frustrate Remy, but Christina hadn't been interested in memorizing anything more complex. She had made a face at Maddie's elaborate substitution for the alphabet and complained that it was too much on top of having to memorize the edible plants she could eat if she got lost in the woods. _You think your "friend" is seeing M2_. M1 was Helena, of course.

She wasn't expecting Christina to respond right away, but minutes later a response flashed on the screen. !WHAT DO YOU THINK I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU. AND SHE'S NOT MY FRIEND ANYMORE! OUR 'RECIPE' ISN'T WORKING!

For you, maybe. Maddie banished the uncharitable, and slightly gloating, thought from her mind. She wasn't giving up on Helena, even if her mom was. _We'll need to change the ingredients_. Christina had though it would be too alarming to their mothers if they referred to "plans." Maddie curled her lip in disgust; like "recipe" was any better, now she and Christina just sounded stupid. Again she worked to clear her mind, typing a second message. _We'll talk when I get back_.

Five seconds later, there it was. !FINALLY!

 **Myka**

As she took out the sensible skirt and sensible blouse she would be wearing to work, she saw the dress she would be wearing to Nate Robinson's charity gala on Saturday in its plastic sheath at the far end of the closet. It was not sensible. It was a one-shoulder midi dress with a noticeable, yet. . . relatively . . . modest, slit up the thigh. Tracy had gone into raptures when the slyly smiling sales associate had beckoned them into an alcove of the women's formal wear area that would never be clearance-priced. Myka had closed her eyes in recognition that the dresses she would be seeing would be at least twice what she had been budgeting to pay, but she hadn't protested. The dark blue dress with the single, thin shoulder strap hadn't been the most expensive dress of the ones she had been shown, but it hadn't been the cheapest either. It had set her back at least four or five trips to Home Depot and put her DIY projects additional weeks behind schedule, but the dress had transformed what Myka viewed as her innately gawky, knobby frame, with its long bones and prominent joints, into something dramatic and imposing. She didn't have Gigi's raw sex appeal or Helena's striking coloring with its suggestion of wickedness barely held in check, but she looked –

"Good?" Tracy had echoed disbelievingly, observing her sister in the mirror. "Myka, you look more than good, believe me. You have no idea how stunning you are right now, and that's with your hair looking like it's been growing wild in a vacant lot." She had exchanged glances with the sales associate, who nodded in agreement. "Fixed up, with that dress on, you're going to knock Gigi out of the park." As Myka blushed, Tracy stepped in closer, disapproval beginning to win out over smug – and unsubstantiated – confidence in her sister's ability to mesmerize. "Please tell me she's the one you want to impress."

Of course she had been thinking of Gigi. Who else would she be thinking of and who else would she be imagining sliding that single, thin strap off her shoulder? Not that that would be happening because they were still going slow, especially since Maddie had returned from Florida, but it was okay to fantasize about it happening in the near to mid-term – the dress certainly lent itself to those fantasies – and it wasn't as if she were imagining Helena sliding the strap off, eyes sliding up to meet hers, negligently seeking assent . . . . Myka yanked out the skirt and blouse and slammed the closet door shut. She was running late and she didn't have time to think about dresses or women who might be interested in slipping her dress off her.

Downstairs, feeling more like herself than an over-the-hill Cinderella, she poured herself a cup of coffee from the coffee maker that her daughter had so thoughtfully turned on for her. She also found the two halves of an English muffin in the toaster waiting to be toasted and a tub of butter (healthier than vegetable oil spreads, really) nearby. As her muffin toasted, she sipped her coffee and suspiciously eyed Maddie, who was already dressed and finishing her bowl of organic Cheerios (Happy Os, with half the sugar and sodium and twice the fiber), spoon accurately and unwaveringly transporting itself between cereal and mouth as she read on her Kindle. "Thanks for helping me out."

"Sure." Maddie kept reading.

School started next week, but Myka couldn't sense any pent-up excitement or impatience for Monday to arrive any sooner. In fact, Maddie seemed almost listless as she automatically thumbed the Kindle to go to the next page. She had been unusually quiet since coming back from Florida over a week ago. Even the prospect of helping out the Soccer Sprouts wasn't animating her. It had been a long time since Myka had been on the verge of turning 12 and entering middle school; she mainly remembered it as a period marked by her growing three inches and getting braces. But driving home one evening and seeing J.P. Lattimer popping wheelies with his friends in the cul-de-sac off which he, his older sister, and his mother lived, suddenly Myka understood her daughter's enthusiasm for helping Pete with the team. There had been no J.P. with his shaggy hair (carefully barbered just so) and his father's goofy-cocky smile for her; there had been no such clarity for her, then, in her attractions, but she remembered how the world in general had had sharp elbows and big feet, every encounter with a group of giggling girls, virtually arm-in arm in their solidarity, and every laughing exchange of jokes or gossip between them the same as a nasty dig in her ribs or a heel grinding into her toes. Life was a Douglas Sirk movie when you were that age, a lot of crying dressed up in Technicolor and overripe orchestral music.

"When's your grandmother coming to get you?"

Maddie glanced at her phone, which had become a constant companion of late. Myka uneasily wondered if she shouldn't be more uneasy about it. "About 15 minutes." Maddie watched her slather butter on a muffin half and eat it over the kitchen sink. Not very elegant but it prevented her from showing up at the office with a grease stain on her skirt. "You don't have to stick around and wait for her to show up. I'm not going to accidentally burn down the house or anything like that."

And there was that, too, an unaccustomed edge to Maddie's replies, as though she had become the adult and her mother a tiresome child. It hadn't reached the obnoxious level yet, but it was climbing. Maybe this was the beginning of her descent into hell, Myka thought, a six-year agony of being on the wrong, clueless, old-fashioned end of everything. Her mother had offered to take Maddie shopping for school clothes and supplies, and Myka had gratefully accepted the reprieve from Maddie's anxieties that every pair of jeans made her hips look wide and, conversely, that every top made her chest look like a boy's. "I trust you to turn off the coffee maker," Myka said blandly, reaching behind her to turn it off preemptively. She did trust her daughter, but she was first and foremost a mother.

"You were talking to someone late last night," Maddie said abruptly, still continuing to read her Kindle. "I got up to go to the bathroom, and I heard you. You were laughing a lot. Was it Michelle?"

The question, it had almost sounded . . . disingenuous, which wasn't an adjective Myka was looking forward to using with any frequency when it came to Maddie's behavior. Did she know . . . how could she know . . .had she and Tracy been texting? Not that she and Michelle hadn't laughed together, but Myka had to admit, with an increasing sense of embarrassment, that there was a flirtatiousness to her conversations with Gigi that there hadn't been with Michelle. She felt girlish in a way she couldn't remember feeling before, which was strange since Gigi was, well, Gigi. Gigi should be the one giggling and putting her hand to her cheeks to feel the heat in them, not sensible-skirt-and-blouse-wearing Myka Bering. If Maddie already suspected something, maybe she should just tell her. Maybe she didn't have to work quite so hard to field test her girlfriends; maybe Gigi had sufficiently proven herself and maybe Maddie was sufficiently old enough, that she could relax . . . just a little.

"No, it wasn't Michelle." Myka took a breath, hoping she wasn't inhaling her coffee at the same time. "I am seeing someone, but it's not Michelle. Gigi's a friend of Helena's."

"I saw you two talking at the pool party. Do I get to meet her?" Finally Maddie lifted her head up from the Kindle, her eyes, unimpeachably blue and clear, drilling into her mother's.

It was one of those moments when Maddie inarguably, irrevocably was her own person, not a mixture of her and Sam, but someone completely differently, completely other. It wasn't hard to see ahead to the end of the next six years of agony, when Maddie would leave for college, and even if she returned to live with her mother for the rest of her life (which Myka profoundly hoped would not be the case), she wouldn't ever fully return. There would always be some part of her that Myka couldn't –and wouldn't – lay claim to. Smiling, albeit sadly, into the coffee she had so nearly aspirated, Myka said, "Friday afternoon, I'm having lunch with your aunt and then I'm going to a salon that Gigi recommended to have my hair cut and styled. Gigi said she might drop by if she had the time – you're welcome to come along, if you want."

Maddie moved her head from side to side, as if weighing her options. "Let me think about it."

When Myka got to the office, she didn't dive into her work exactly, but three back-to-back meetings and a memo she needed to write for President Kosan's review, which he would probably only skim on a flight to yet another conference, this time in New York, provided a refuge from the troubling disruptions to her morning routine. Her mornings didn't usually start out with her staring at an expensive, sexy dress – one that she would be wearing, no less – and fantasizing about an equally sexy woman trying to take it off her. Nor had she ever had to ask herself – that she could remember – which sexy woman it was. Then, trying to shake off the weirdness of it all, she had planned to eat her usual coffee-and-English-muffin breakfast on her way out the door when she had let a couple of acerbic remarks from her daughter pin her to the floor in befuddlement. Here in her office, however, she could reset. She was in command . . . and she had already excavated her emergency package of Twizzlers.

She hadn't opened them yet, so the day wasn't completely lost. In fact she forgot the Twizzlers and lunch as she worked to clear her desk for the rare Friday she was taking as a vacation day. Irene was well aware of the fact that she was going as Gigi's date to Nate's charity "gala" and heartily approved of the opportunities it would provide her, and the university by extension, to network with the city's most important business leaders, not to mention the CEOs of certain undisputedly well-known corporations, who, as Nate's friends, might be expected to attend as well. She suspected that if she hadn't mentioned to Irene that she would be taking Friday off that Irene would have suggested it; she hadn't missed the arched eyebrow as Irene took in the riot of her hair one especially windy morning. Sometime between her reading of proposals for co-ventures between the university's engineering program and various architectural and construction firms and her confirming her calendar for next week with her assistant, Myka devoured a sandwich and answered a call from her mother, who wanted confirmation that the necklines of Maddie's top should be decorous, "befitting a young lady," Jeannie Bering said in a tone clearly meant for her granddaughter. Wanting to remind her mother that she was 66, not 96, and simultaneously groaning at the thought that her daughter also was acting decades older than she was, Myka wearily concurred that "all clothing should be age- and school-appropriate." When her phone rang again, she was ready to demand that her mother put Maddie on the line.

"Should I call at another time?" Gigi asked, amused.

"You promise that you're not my daughter, whom I'm ready to strangle, by the way?"

"I am . . .," Gigi paused, then said with a lightness that didn't disguise a note of uncertainty, "I'm your girlfriend, if you didn't know."

It was too soon. Dinners and make-out sessions spread out over the course of a few weeks, and since Maddie had been back, their time together had been further reduced to a hurried lunch and a handful of calls. How could that be elevated to the level of a relationship? But it didn't feel presumptuous, Gigi saying "I'm your girlfriend," it felt right. It suddenly righted a day that had gotten off on the wrong foot with her from the moment she had opened her closet door. Who was the universe to ask her if she knew what woman she wanted to see her in her new dress? She wouldn't have bought it for Helena. Helena was 20 years ago, Helena was with Nate, Helena wasn't the woman she was destined to be with. Maybe Gigi wasn't either, but she didn't know for certain, and she planned to enjoy the process of finding out. Myka wondered how loud her grin sounded. Did a grin have sound? The size of the one on her face deserved a trumpet call at least. "Glad we have that settled." Would telling Gigi that she might meet Maddie tomorrow be good or bad timing right now? "Um, just so you know, Maddie may be with Tracy and me tomorrow, so if you're thinking of dropping by the salon . . . I'm giving you fair warning."

"I'm not completely without skills in dealing with tweens. Helena has trusted me to take care of Christina on occasion."

"It's the quiet, obedient ones you have to watch out for, you know."

"Are we still talking about Maddie?"

Myka laughed, a nervous hiccup turning it into something dismayingly giggle-like just at the moment that Irene appeared in her doorway. "I have to go," she murmured, "maybe you can call me later tonight, or I can call you?"

"Ah," Gigi said, her voice low, knowing, and disturbingly sexy at 2:30 in the afternoon, "you've been busted. I should be home by 11:00, another PR, excuse me, fundraising event for Larry tonight."

"Talk to you later," Myka said, with a briskness that utterly failed to disguise the fact that she was talking to her girlfriend, yes, girlfriend, during work hours. Irene was beckoning her into the hallway, and Myka could only hope that the promptness with which she was complying was answering for her lack of professionalism.

"Let's drop by Leena's office, shall we? She has some suggestions for those proposals by the school of engineering." Irene had arched her eyebrow, and Myka's hand automatically went to her hair. As they walked down the hall, Irene looking impeccable as usual in a tan skirt suit with a persimmon-colored shell, which was both sensible _and_ classy (You'll get there, Myka counseled herself, you'll get there), she said so casually that Myka was almost, almost fooled, "You haven't said much about the friend who's taking you to the bash. How does she know Nate Robinson?"

With another nervous hiccup that made her sound not at all giggly and more like she was seeking Irene's approval, Myka said, "I met her through Helena actually, at her daughter's pool party." Then, because Irene was going to have to find out anyway, she added, "Giselle, Gigi, I mean, works for the mayor. She does his PR, sets up his public events, acts as his spokesperson. You've probably seen her a million times on the news."

"I see." Irene's reaction wasn't one of surprise or, worse, astonishment, like Tracy's. As always, it was virtually impossible to tell from Irene's face what she was thinking. She didn't seem to find it impossible that someone who boosted the wattage of the most mundane of Mayor Jenkins's proposals (expanding the staff of the parks department or reducing the water supply to the city's famed downtown fountain) would be interested in dating her. "Did Helena play matchmaker?

It wasn't the kind of follow-up question Myka was expecting. As she looked at Irene in puzzlement, Irene murmured, with the barest hint of a smile, "I thought not."

The meeting with Leena should have been brief. What she was recommending for inclusion in the co-venture agreements that the university was preparing to sign wasn't controversial: internships and the opportunity for eligible engineering students to work on the projects that the companies were sponsoring, awards for students in the program whose work was innovative and problem-solving. "And the chance to poach our best and brightest at an early stage," Leena said wryly. "Students aren't any less immune than my five-year-old son to something that's big and shiny and sets the grown-ups to clapping. A $20 trophy could deliver these companies employees for life." She turned her hands palms-up in a supplicating gesture. "Just looking for ways to raise the profile of our programs."

Myka blinked, trying to rid herself of the memory of another supplication, one far less ironically made, Pete Lattimer's hopeful, Labrador Retriever gaze as he asked her to intercede on his behalf with Leena. "Why don't you send some draft language to me, and I'll include it my comments on the proposals." Glancing at the framed pictures of Cam on Leena's desk, she forced herself to ask, "Speaking of your son, is he happy that the Sprouts are back to practice?"

"Overjoyed. He sleeps with his soccer ball at night instead of his stuffed tiger, and he wants to play for Chelsea, or maybe it's Arsenal, when he's older. He can barely pronounce some of the team names, so I'm not sure which is which. I'm pretty sure he doesn't know either."

The meeting could have ended then. Leena had accomplished her purpose, and Myka had tried to do justice to the memory of Pete of eating stale, fake Fig Newtons and all but pleading with her to persuade Leena that he was date-worthy material by giving Leena an opening to say something, anything, about Cam's coach. She was about to excuse herself to return to her office when Leena said, "He adores Coach Pete. Your daughter used to be on the Sprouts when she was Cam's age, right? I've seen her at the practices helping out. And it's not just Maddie and Cam, every kid on the team loves him. What's his gift?" Her tone was more curious than skeptical.

Not everyone adored Pete. There was his ex-wife Amanda, but even she was known to display a begrudging fondness for him. More than once she had shown up at a practice to harry Pete's assistant coaches (i.e. his kids) home, only to end up staying and helping him to set out the post-practice snacks. "It didn't come easy for him, confidence and finding the positives. He wants to make it easier for the kids. It's hard to argue with his goal, and it's pretty hard not to love Pete." She wasn't giving anything away about him that she shouldn't. Especially when he was working with children, his joking and teasing had a gentleness that showed he understood just how fragile the belief in the goodness of others, in one's own goodness, could be. Inside every goofy guy, he would tell her, there's a sad guy.

Then he would say, laughing almost manically, _and_ inside him, there's another awesomely goofy guy.

"If you don't make it up that hill," Leena began in a sing-song.

"You won't get the sweet slide down," Myka joined in. "You go to enough Sprouts games, and you'll never get that saying of his out of your head."

There were worse notes on which to end a meeting, and Myka, walking back to her office with Irene, thought the day was turning out to be much, much better than the morning had promised. She had found out she had a girlfriend, a very hot girlfriend, and she had followed through for Pete. That was a lot of goodness right there.

Irene stopped her just as she was about to stride into the room and take command of her desk and its stacks of folders. "Are you trying to fix Leena up with Coach Pete?"

Damn, Irene was unreadable. Myka wasn't sure whether she ought to feel chastised. "I just wanted to reassure her that the kids love Pete for all the right reasons – not just because he can be a big kid himself." She had tried to say it breezily, but she was pretty sure she hadn't been successful. She wasn't a breezy, offhand kind of person; she was the kind of person who was invested in what she had to say. She wanted Leena to approve of Pete because, regardless of whether she would ever want to date him, he was a good man.

"Mmm . . . I think she was already drawing that conclusion." Irene gave her a rare consoling pat on the arm, as if she were advising her not to feel embarrassed for being so transparent . . . or, equally as possible, misguided. "Besides, love doesn't work that way. You can't nudge it one way or the other, you can't lead it. It goes where it goes." She fixed her with a look whose knowingness Myka was determined to ignore. "My father compared love to a dandelion. It floats on air, lands where it will, and once it takes root, it's nearly impossible to get rid of."

"That's not very romantic."

"It's not supposed to be. My father was a very practical man. Yet he and my mother were happily married for more than 50 years." After another consoling pat, Irene left her standing in the doorway.

 **Helena**

There were other rooms to which she could have escaped Nate's event planner and her staff other than their bedroom, but the bedroom held her walk-in closet, itself the size of many families' living rooms, and the event-related crisis which she had to solve was located in it. She was unhappy with her dress. Not the "I don't like my outfit" unhappiness that she could temporarily assuage by changing out her shoes or adding a scarf or a favorite piece of jewelry and then, after donating the offending clothes, resolving never to make such an ill-advised choice again. It was the rare but ungovernable "I absolutely cannot wear this" unhappiness. She had had no misgivings when she bought the dress. She had had no second thoughts about it, any thoughts about it, but now as she looked at it, she wanted to rip it to shreds, preferably with a pair of shears, but she would use her teeth if she had to. It fit her, even flattered her, making her legs seem longer than they were, slimming her waist. It was the kind of cocktail dress that a woman might wear to a patio party, sturdy enough to hold up to minor sweating and spills but stylish enough to rise above them. It was the kind of dress that Nate wanted her to wear to an event that he self-indulgently styled as a small-town country club supper. A small-town country club supper for which the guests, if not the hosts, dressed in finery suitable for an inaugural ball and which was costing thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in preparation.

It was all the preparation, though she was responsible, thankfully, for little of it, that had resulted in her seeing it, Gigi's RSVP. The event planner had wanted to meet with her to go over the guest list. Knowing who among the self-important were planning to attend was the least of it. Knowing which constellation of guests would threaten a supernova and which wouldn't was critical. For example, a director on the board of Nate's company and the CEO of a medical equipment firm in which Nate was a significant investor needed to be kept on opposites sides of a room at all times; a golf outing that had ended in threats of violence 20 years ago could still fuel outbursts. It was also essential to remind Nate that he couldn't be seen to be too chummy with the likely Republican candidate for governor, not with Larry Jenkins attending the party as well.

As the event planner thumbed through the RSVPs (despite the party's faux homey trappings, Nate had insisted on mailing invitations, stiff, professionally printed, multi-envelope affairs), Helena saw one she wasn't expecting. Gigi had been invited for years (it didn't do to cold shoulder the mayor's supposed paramour), but she had told Helena when they were dating that she inevitably threw them away. "I always go with Larry. He returns the RSVP." But the event planner had already flipped past the mayor's RSVP, which had the option "attending with guest" checked. Gigi had broken with tradition – and her history of confirming rumors that she was sleeping with the mayor by doing nothing to refute them – and returned her RSVP, also with "attending with guest" checked.

It was obvious to Helena, if not to the event planner, who her guest was. While it was always possible that Gigi was bringing someone else, a VIP donor for Larry's all-but-declared gubernatorial run or even her mother, such possibilities seemed unlikely. Enticing businessmen with deep pockets was best finessed in a setting that heightened Gigi's appeal, a private dining room with romantically dim lighting, not a party at which Larry's rivals would also be guests and the highlight would be a polka band. As for Gigi's mother being her date, it would require a significant inducement, typically cash, as Helena understood that particular mother-daughter relationship, to get Alice Nelson-Schneider-Hoekstra-Bjornberg-Anderson (the "Fourier" was Gigi's invention as was the "Giselle," Helena suspected) to fly from Phoenix for the weekend. No, Gigi's plus one was Myka.

The event planner had been 20 RSVPs ahead of her by then and there were expenses that needed her approval as well as confirmations of when the polka band should start and stop playing, when Nate expected to make his customary announcements and obligatory expressions of gratitude, when the event planning staff should discreetly begin signaling that it was time for the guests to leave. Helena had had no time to brood about what Myka's appearing on Gigi's arm might mean. Not that she had been inclined to brood. It was nothing to her whom Myka dated. Granted, she had initially felt some concern after the pool party because she was well acquainted with Gigi's relationship history, or lack thereof, but Myka wasn't a 21-year-old virgin fresh from her father's used bookstore and if she chose to invite heartbreak and disillusionment by becoming involved with a woman who treated sex solely as a competitive sport, it was her choice. As Helena turned Gigi's RSVP face down and put it at the bottom of the pile while the event planner's attention was elsewhere, she had concluded that she was too busy and too indifferent to spend any more time on Gigi and Myka. She didn't care, although she would admit to a little disappointment. Gigi was wonderful in her way, but she wasn't the type of woman Helena would have predicted Myka to be interested in. Not that she needed, or wanted, to know about Myka's love life because it was none of her concern and really, she couldn't be less -

"Mom!" Christina was wildly waving her hand in front of Helena's face. "This is, like, the third time I've asked. Is it okay if Maddie stays over Saturday night?"

Reorienting herself, Helena struggled to assimilate a succession of disturbing realizations. First, her daughter had invaded her sanctum of sanctums without her being aware of it. Christina wasn't inherently destructive, but the squashed toe of a Jimmy Choo peeping out from under her foot spoke to why her proximity to expensive objects had to be actively managed. Second, and closely related to the first unwelcome realization, was that despite the arrangements that had been made to have Christina stay at a schoolfriend's Saturday night, which, at the time, had had Christina's enthusiastic approval and which, in fact, she had suggested, her daughter had suddenly changed her mind. If she could be depended upon to stay in her room watching videos or in her art room painting, it would be one thing, but Christina was just as likely to launch water balloons from the staircase, just to see the guests scatter like mice. Third, she wanted Maddie to stay with her, and though Maddie, unlike some of Christina's other friends, reduced the odds of mayhem, Maddie was Myka's daughter, which led to the fourth and most unwelcome realization, which was that Helena understood she wasn't unhappy with her dress – she would be unhappy with any of her dresses right now – she was unhappy that Gigi's plus one was Myka. It turned out that she did care – very much.

"Does she have her mother's permission?" Helena turned her head, the combination of seeing the Jimmy Choo flattened under Christina's impervious foot and the small-town country club cocktail dress she was to wear made her nauseous. She couldn't abide it, any of it, the party, the dress -.

"She'll be okay with it, if you're okay with it," Christina said confidently.

Don't be too sure about that, Helena silently warned her. She and Myka seemed farther apart now than they had been the awkward afternoon when they faced each other across 20 years of silence. "You wanted to spend the night at Emma's, remember? You can't change your mind on a whim, Christina. Have you thought about how she might feel?" It might be late – and futile – to caution her daughter about acting thoughtlessly, but she had no desire to drop Maddie off at Myka's Sunday morning and see Gigi's car parked in the scabrous driveway. She was scoring a mark under the "good mother" column while simultaneously ensuring she minimized her level of discomfort . . . misery. As soon as that word popped into her mind, Helena immediately banished it.

"I already talked to her. She got an invitation to go to the water park from one of the Jennifers, so she's good with everything. Besides, I told her we could have a sleepover here soon and have a movie night in the theater room and use Nate's popcorn machine." Christina frowned down at the floor; she lifted her foot and sent the Jimmy Choo spinning to the opposite wall.

Her daughter, destroyer and wheeler-dealer wrapped into one small package. "Very soon, sooner than your movie night, we're going to have a discussion about how you treat shoes that cost almost as much as your school tuition." Helena smiled thinly. "Even sooner than that, we're going to have a discussion about rules of behavior, yours, during the party. In the meantime, however, you can tell Maddie that she's welcome to stay over Saturday night as long as her mother agrees."

Christina threw herself at her mother in what might have been a hug, or a tackle. "Mom, you're the . . . " was muffled against her chest, and Helena, feeling rather than hearing the last word, decided that, as with most situations involving Christina, ambiguity was a plus rather than a minus.

Still, the closet was less sanctum-like and more humdrum, everyday closet-like once Christina whirled out of the room to call Maddie. Scanning the racks for something other than the cocktail dress, which held all the appeal of a hairshirt or a whalebone corset, Helena saw a dress she would have instinctively ruled out a mere week ago. It was very expensive, very formal, not small-town country club at all; it was a crimson-colored evening gown, mermaid style with a train, which she had worn to a Halloween party last year with Nate. She had been a vampire, and he had been a reluctant Van Helsing. She had been stunning, she admitted with no attempt at false modesty, whereas Nate had never stopped griping about the cut of the suit, its material, the pocket watch he kept forgetting to tuck into his vest pocket, and the walking stick she had insisted he carry. No one would have mistaken him for a nineteenth century gentleman, but the other guests would have agreed that he was ready to plant a stake in her.

They had spent an atrocious amount of money on the costumes, especially her dress, but Nate had wanted to formalize a business arrangement with a skittish investor, and the investor was hosting the party. There hadn't been a man in the room whose eyes hadn't followed her, except Nate's. His hungry gaze had been fixed instead on the investor. He wouldn't be happy to see her in this dress Saturday night. It was too flashy, too provocative, and damn hard to dance a polka in. Yet she wasn't going to spend the night hanging on his arm and making small talk with his friends and acquaintances. She intended to draw blood.


	8. Chapter 8

_I Can't Imagine Anyone Not Loving Mother. She's Absolutely Divine._

 **Helena**

Nate had been displeased when he saw her in the dress. What happened to the other one? It was simple but sharp. It fit the tone. This isn't a state dinner, Helena. Maybe not for you, she had retorted, but your guests treat it like an inaugural gala. They're here to curry favor with you, Nate, and you bloody well know it. You put on a thrift-store blazer and clown around with your polka band as though you think the height of success is being president of the local Chamber of Commerce, but you know how many of the men are sweating in their Tom Ford suits to strike a deal with you – and you enjoy it.

He had been shrugging into said thrift-store blazer, which wasn't a thrift-store blazer at all, and was, in fact, a very expensive off-the-rack jacket from Nordstrom's. He had stared at her reflection in the mirror, his expression clearly saying, Is that what you think? But he had said nothing as he shot out the cuffs of his shirt and wriggled his back against the yoke of the jacket. Finally he had said, It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to put people in the mood to give back. He hadn't waited for her to take a last assessing look at her appearance or fuss about the earrings she was wearing before deciding to leave them in. He had swept past her, seemingly intent on taking all the hosting duties upon himself. He wasn't the door-slamming type, but she would have preferred it to what he said before he had oh-so-softly shut the door behind him. It's not about you. None of this is about you.

Which seemed to sum up their relationship. It wasn't about _her_ , Helena Guinevere Wells, the 42-year-old single mother who worried about her weight and whether she needed to touch up her roots more often, who questioned (only late at night) whether Future Image provided anything of lasting value (or any value) to the world, who feared for the future happiness (not to mention job prospects) of the odd mix of whimsy and hard-edged practicality that was her daughter. Did Nate ever look at the books on her nightstand? (She preferred ones with covers and backs she could fold back and crack and splay; reading e-books at night only added to the incipient crows-feet at the corners of her eyes.) They were books on history, science, politics – weighty matters. So she had stars from reality TV shows as clients, it didn't mean that she mistook _The Bachelorette_ for a modern-day reimagining of Jane Austen. Did he know how often she woke up at night only to stare for half-an-hour or more at their bedroom's cavernous ceiling? Sometimes it was the stirring of a vague anxiety, usually about Christina, that had jerked her awake. At other times she was fighting her way out of a dream in which she had lost something precious, although she never remembered it was.

At the low points in their relationship, she would recall what Gigi had told her about him after she had mentioned that Nate Robinson was looking for a PR firm to manage the fallout from a plant closing. "He's the Corn King, and not because there's hardly a corn field or a product made from corn that he doesn't have a piece of. It's because he's like a monocrop himself, completely uniform and planted on this earth to do one thing."

"Which is?"

"To make money." Gigi had been resting on her side, facing Helena across the expanse of her very big bed. "He'll find you attractive, and he'll want more from you than a clean-up of the mess the announcement of the plant closing made. He's been at loose ends since his divorce; it's been painful to watch him try to act like a player. You could put him out of his misery and become the second Mrs. Nate Robinson. Your future would be secure, even if he insists on a pre-nup. The contacts you'll make, the business he'll throw your way –"

"I'm hardly that cold-blooded," Helena had interrupted, although this post-relationship benefit that she and Gigi occasionally extended to each other, initiated by nothing more than proximity and opportunity, did little to confirm the existence of deeper feelings. "I liked to be wooed."

"If you'd told me that earlier, I would have exerted myself more," Gigi had laughed as she took in Helena's sour face. "I don't know what you expected to find out here in the heartland, but you didn't get it, and you've been searching for something to replace it ever since. You may not fall madly in love with him, but Nate's not the type to miss it much. He's –"

"Corn, yes, I understand," Helena had said acerbically. "And you know so much about him because . . . ." She had raised her eyebrows suggestively.

"Because my job is to get Larry to talk corn." Gigi had wagged a finger. "Nate Robinson will not be something we share in the biblical sense, although I definitely want to convert him to my side politically." Suddenly sighing and shaking her head, the gloriously mussed hair just as gloriously falling back into place, she had said, "Forget everything I've said. Just do the job and don't go out to dinner with him. It'll never work because you, I hate to say it, are a romantic deep down, and he's not."

"Someday," Helena had said mock-threateningly, "someday I'll see you half-arsed about a young twit, Gigi, and I'll remind you of how low the once-majestic Giselle Fourier has fallen, and I'll laugh at you in your shame."

There had been another shake of Gigi's head, this time a signal that she was tired of the subject, and her eyes had a calculating light that had nothing to do with Nate Robinson. "Someday you may be laughing at my shame, but right now, I'm going to make you beg."

Tempted to fan herself with her hand even though she was recalling a moment from 18 months ago, Helena credited Gigi with being right, in the end, about one thing. Nate was, oftentimes dismayingly, single-minded. When she had been the focus of his interest, she had naturally found it flattering. He had rented out restaurants and movie theaters for their dates, sent her flowers every day for a month, and repeatedly tried to engage with the one Wells female who refused to be impressed. Despite her professed desire to be wooed, his dogged efforts weren't what had won Helena over, nor had he displayed such talents in the bedroom that she had been overwhelmed by lust. His appreciation of her as a businesswoman had won, if not her heart, then the part of her that yearned to be acknowledged for being good at something worthwhile. Being capable of smoking prodigious amounts of weed and scoring with every attractive undergraduate who crossed her path had been achievements of a sort and she had taken a perverse pride in being able to squander time and energy that she knew she could put to better use, but she when she, finally, had stopped being an undergraduate herself, it became harder and harder for her to deny that she was anchorless, floating from distraction to distraction. She had been 27 when, finding herself broke and abandoned by her latest paramour (who had absconded with her cash and credit cards) in the Seychelles, she had placed an emergency call to Charles. He had wired her a ticket home and then offered her a job at his fledgling public relations firm. She had been grateful and, beyond being grateful, she had applied herself, possibly for the first time in her life. She was good at the work. She instinctively understood, in a way Charles couldn't, that projecting a positive image was as much or more about convincing others that weaknesses were strengths, that bad outcomes were the best possible results, and, in Nate Robinson's case, that plant closures were opportunities for growth. How else could she have made a straight-arrow, straight A student fall in love with a chronic underachiever who was allergic to monogamy, if she hadn't argued that the breadth of her experience (so many wrong turns, so many forgettable one-night stands) was what made her appreciate her beloved all the more?

She had used the same tactic on the little community of Fern (ridiculous name), which had been home to an aging corn processing plant (one that turned corn inedible for human consumption into the filler found in cheap brands of pet food) that Nate intended to close because a much larger plant he owned in Mexico could do the same processing more efficiently and with even fewer employees. Shutting down a plant considered the life blood of a small town was bound to generate bad press, but small towns were dying across the state for much the same reason, and Nate's public relations staff had believed there would be a couple of weeks of disapproving editorials and angry letters to the editor in print and online media but nothing more. Moreover, they assured him that the generous post-employment benefits he intended to provide (and he would provide them, he was informed) would lessen the outrage. But those "consummate professionals" had overlooked the fact that it was an election year and that one of the state's congressmen came from Fern.

He lost no time castigating Nate as a member of the liberal elite (although Nate's record was solidly Republican) whose allegiance wasn't to the U.S. but the E.U. and whose plants and farms routinely relied on the labor provided by illegal immigrants (there was likely some truth to that). The congressman canvassed his district with a rotating line-up of soon-to-be-unemployed Fern residents (their crying tow-headed offspring were a TV ratings godsend), and though his re-election was more the result of voter inertia than full-throated support, Nate believed, with justification, that his reputation in his home state had suffered a blow.

Helena hadn't marched into his boardroom with binders stuffed with studies and opinion polls and a bevy of assistants trailing her. For one thing, she didn't have any assistants and, for another, she didn't believe in spending money, especially her money, on information that wouldn't be read. Instead she drove to Fern, paid for a room at the local motel, and then stayed for the better part of the week, touring the plant, talking with the local businessmen and area farmers, and eating her meals at the town diner. When she left Fern, she was almost 10 pounds heavier, even more skeptical about the long-term survival of rural America, but in possession of a plan.

If Fern's workforce was too old, too small, and too expensive to support long term (i.e., employer contribution 401(k)s, health care, a living wage) then treat it like the charity case it was, she had counseled him. He could use his foundation to provide grants to those who had visions of revitalizing the area and scholarships to regional colleges and technical schools for those who wanted to learn new job skills. If he wanted to limit his investment, he could partner with government programs and persuade the state's other titans to invest in "family friendly Fern." He could also reach out to the congressman determined to paint Nate Robinson as an enemy of the people and turn him into an ally. First, she counseled, ask him what he thought should be done for Fern and then make a very sizeable donation to his campaign chest. In the end, it wasn't a matter of whether anything worked, it was letting himself be seen doing _something_. Hope was both the cheapest and most lethal drug on the planet.

Nate hadn't been entirely convinced by her argument, but he was tired of seeing his name in print, preceded and/or followed by a string of expletives, and he especially didn't like the cold shoulder he had been receiving in his own hometown. He had also liked her, liked her brutal analysis of Fern's prospects and even of him, liked the extra ten pounds on her. The late nights spent on rehabilitating his image had included dinners and shoulder massages and, once the shoulder massages began, the late nights had inevitably turned into overnights. The two of them had taken up occupancy in the middle ground that had utter indifference and arse-over-teakettle in love as its poles when, some six months after she had made her pitch to him, they began to see results from the course of action she had proposed. The shuttered plant had been repurposed to house the offices of the start-ups that had received seed money from his foundation. Some of the farms affected by the plant closing were going organic as the result of a new line being promoted by the Robinson companies – boutique organic pet food. Others had been sold to a group of investors determined to make Fern the epicenter of motocross in the Midwest. Of course, about half the population of the county had left to find work elsewhere, but the point was – and Helena had stabbed her finger into Nate's hairy chest for emphasis – the point was that Fern _looked_ like it was on the comeback trail. He had never made love to her so passionately before or since as he had that night. Not only was Fern supporting the illusion of revitalization, he was actually making a small profit off his efforts, mainly from the tax breaks, but profit was profit.

That had been the high point of their relationship. He had seen what he wanted to see in her, and if she hadn't been dating Nate, if, more to the point, she had been teaching a class on spin, on manipulating public perception, she would have called that moment a shining example of professional success (without, naturally, any explicit reference to how Nate had chosen to express his admiration of her in that moment). But she was dating him, and while Helena Wells, Future Image's second-in-command could turn her back on Fern and congratulate herself on a job well done, Helena Wells, human being, had had a harder time of it. Two years after the plant closing, Fern continued to struggle. She could tell herself that economic and demographic trends were difficult to reverse, and she could say, without much defensiveness, that she had mitigated the severity of the blow; some of the start-ups still survived, while the epicenter of motocross had recently been selected as the site of a major competition. Yet Fern continued to shrink. She knew because she regularly donated money to the town's fundraising drives, which ranged from building a city park to purchasing a new furnace for the elementary school – and because she was the sole financial support for a website promoting investment in the town called Keep Fern Flourishing, which was, even kindly put, a gross exaggeration.

For Nate, what was out of the news was out of mind. She suspected that in a few years he would no longer remember there had been a plant in Fern, let alone that he had decided to close it. When Fern ceased to be important to him, it had ceased to exist. It wasn't a promising sign.

 **Christina**

She had wanted Maddie to bring Remy with her for the night, but both her mom and Myka had vetoed the idea. Her mom called Remy a "mess" and "barely housetrained," claiming that two 11-year-old girls could wreak sufficient havoc by themselves on Nate's party. Myka had been nicer, worrying, according to Maddie, that introducing Remy to a strange house with a lot of people would stress her out. Christina could understand that point of view; she didn't feel at ease in Nate's house, and she had been living in it since June. She loved Remy; she didn't want to upset her.

Even Maddie thought it was weird that she had become attached so quickly to Remy, but Remy could flop down on the ground with her and just be. Few humans would do that. When she and her mom had gone to Myka's house (the first time – not the horrible second time when she had seen Gigi and Myka kissing), she and Remy had run around the yard, and when she had gotten tired and plopped down on the ground and wondered as ants cruised up and down the blades of crabgrass if the ants were ever curious about her, Remy had sprawled next to her, her head on her paws, content to stay where they were for a million years probably. Christina wanted to be able to do that, sit and not have a thought in her head for a million years. Because her head was so full of images that weren't fun, that didn't make her want to draw them – it was filled with images of Nate, Nate and her mom, and now Gigi and Myka. Nate in a powder-blue tuxedo with an awful ruffled shirt and her mom in a wedding gown, Gigi and Myka holding hands and giving each other moony looks. She was having nightmares in which she was one of her mom's bridesmaids or, even more disturbing, in which she was trying to bust into a church and screaming "Gigi! Myka! No!" but no one heard her.

She couldn't tell Maddie about her nightmares. Although Maddie _said_ she was still in on the plan, she didn't act like it. To be fair, their plan had been so battered by unpredictable events that Christina couldn't say with certainty what it was anymore. Even so, Maddie had been less than outraged at the news that her mother was dating Gigi and not absolutely convinced that they were wrong for each other. In fact, she had offered that Gigi was "pretty nice" and "a lot better than Michelle." Maddie's wavering devotion to their cause was what had made Christina look forward to the possibility that Remy might be allowed to come too. Remy's solid, furry, doggy-thereness at the foot of her bed would banish the nightmares. Maddie's Kindle-reading into the wee hours of the night would not.

Right now she didn't know where Maddie was. She suspected that Maddie was hovering at the back of the "ballroom" on the first floor (which wasn't a ballroom at all but two adjoining rooms temporarily emptied of their furniture) or at the head of the staircase and peering down into the foyer, watching Nate's guests in their fancy dresses and suits flow in and out of the house. She could also be on the terrace, which was strung with lights because that's where everyone would be later when it was time for Nate to give his big stupid speech and for him and her mom to dance to his stupid polka band. There was a huge white tent set up on the back lawn and that was where the polka band would play.

She and Maddie weren't imprisoned on the second floor, but her mom had urged them to occupy themselves in her art room or watch movies in the basement theater instead of "gawping" at the guests. If they had to sneak peeks, they needed to be discreet and, above all, they needed to behave. Her mom had said it several times to them but her mom had mainly been looking at her and not Maddie as she said it. Christina would have much preferred to hear her mom say "gawping" over and over, it sounded more interesting than "behave."

"Hey," Maddie said breathlessly, running into the bedroom, "my mom and Gigi are here. You ought to see them."

Christina put down her iPad. There hadn't been any interesting dog pictures on Instagram, anyway. When she got her dog – that was the least she was going to demand if her mom and Nate actually got married – she was going to teach it how to pose . . . and paint. "You're just going to tell me that Gigi's beautiful and your mom looks like a dork. It's what you've been worrying about since you got here." Myka hadn't looked party-ready when she had dropped Maddie off earlier in the day. Her hair had been loosely held back by a scrunchy and she had been wearing paint-splattered jeans and an old football jersey. She had looked like a typical mom on a Saturday afternoon.

"Come see them."

Christina followed her downstairs. The foyer was still filling with guests, and she zigged between one set of overdressed men and women, their conversation as hard and bright as the women's jewelry, and zagged between another, equally as shiny with the glow of money. Maddie disappeared behind a group clustering like a school of fish around one of the catering staff offering flutes of champagne only to bob to the surface several feet away in the hangar-like space of the adhoc ballroom. Christina caught up with her without bumping into too many people; she hadn't sent anyone to the floor, not even intentionally, but the noise, which seemed to fill her ears like water the way jumping into the pool did without the same promise of fun, was becoming oppressive. It was making her chest feel tight, and while it was also driving all thoughts about Nate and her mom from her head, the "Wonderful to see you's" and "You look beautiful's" weren't nearly as comforting as Remy's snuffles and muted woofs. Suddenly Maddie's hand was on her arm, and she was point to the center of the room. "There."

That Gigi was at the center of the center wasn't a surprise. Her mom said that Gigi could walk into a McDonald's like it was the after party on opening night. She wasn't one of those women who were being told they were gorgeous because they had spent a lot of money on their dress. She _was_ gorgeous. The hair that wasn't blond or brown but could be whatever color it chose because it was her hair glinted silver and gold and bronze in a wave that swept around her neck and spilled over one shoulder. The dress was simple, black; that was all it had to be. It didn't have to disguise imperfections and it didn't have to announce how expensive it was. Christina took in all of this in a single glance. Gigi wasn't the surprise, Gigi could only be Gigi. Myka, on the other hand was . . . .

 **Helena**

Stunning. Helena felt as she had the first time she had seen Myka, the same sense of being jostled or nudged only to turn around and discover that the clumsy idiot who was treading on her heels wasn't there. What had brought her to a stop was in front of her. Eighteen years ago, she had been walking across campus on a Saturday evening in September on her way to what she had been assured was the nearest convenience store to buy cigarettes. She didn't often smoke cigarettes, but she preferred them to weed when she was feeling low. She hadn't wanted to come to this school. As she had whined to Charles over the phone as she literally threw clothes into a suitcase, being a few credits shy of graduation hadn't been an impediment for many successful people.

"True, but they were using the time they would have spent sitting in classes or studying doing something that furthered their dreams. They didn't waste that time sleeping or screwing someone they had fancied at a party. They had a _vision_ of what they wanted out of life, Helena. What's yours?"

Helena had looked guiltily at her bed, still cooling from the work-out that she and the someone she had fancied at a party the night before had given it. "Can't say yet. It's still coming into focus."

Her vision of her future was no clearer having arrived at this tiny outpost of intellectual freedom and creative expression in the borderlands between the Corn Belt and the Rust Belt. To Helena, it was one big belt of industrial-looking farms and rundown manufacturing plants. The town had looked no more prepossessing on her bus ride from O'Hare, bisected by a river the color of March snow, gray with disturbing streaks of black and yellow. Smoke stacks on one side and, on the other, the college's main administrative building crowning the summit of a hill. It was her last, best hope for completing her degree, for proving that the last six years of her life hadn't been entirely wasted in a fug of weed and sex, unwashed bedding and unwashed partners. She had missed the start of classes by a week, maybe two, having stayed behind in Costa Rica after vagabonding through Central America with friends most of the summer. She had run into another set of friends in San Jose, who had promised her better parties in the resorts near Puntarenas. The parties hadn't disappointed, and it had been all too easy to let the first day of classes and then the next ones slip past until Charles had called. So while the rest of the student body was enjoying a weekend of bands and barbecue, a grand outdoor party before fall arrived in force, she was studying or, more accurately, she was going to smoke and feel sorry for herself with a textbook open but unread on her lap. If the bands played loudly enough, the music might reach her in the off-off campus apartment Charles had found for her.

The party overlapped the main lawn, so uniform a green and so meticulously maintained that it seemed to unroll like a rug, and extended into the streets closest to the campus. Unfortunately, the convenience store was on the other side of the campus, which meant the most direct route would be through the crowds, not around them. Threading her way between dancing students and banquet tables filled with tubs of iced soft drinks, Helena saw people drawing back on either side of her, an undergraduate version of the parting of the Red Sea only she doubted that she was about to be miraculously delivered. Straight ahead of her was a woman dancing as gracelessly as Elaine Benes, as any wallflower teen in a summer movie, as anyone might who had no appreciation of rhythm but took joy in every uncoordinated swing of her hips because who wouldn't want to dance and laugh and unexpectedly kiss someone on a perfectly balanced night like this? The bite of autumn in the breeze was tempered by the lingering warmth of a late summer afternoon. She was leggy, this impossibly bad dancer, the shorts she wore showing off the long lines that tapered to feet hopelessly unable to find the drumming beat of the song.

Helena felt it. It thundered in her rib cage as she continued to stare at the woman dancing so obliviously. The woman's hair was long and wiry, whipping from side to side as she rocked her head, and when her eyes happened to meet Helena's (although Myka always claimed that her eyes had been closed, all the better to "concentrate on the music"), Helena saw past the glasses, the lenses large and thick in dated frames, the child-like streaks of dirt on her face (the dust sent flying from those savagely trampling feet), and saw only the achingly beautiful symmetry of cheeks, nose, mouth. She didn't approach her, didn't speak to her. She didn't have to. Helena would know this woman anywhere. She could not see her again for 40 years, and she would recognize her immediately. She knew this woman the way you knew something gorgeous and illuminating and one of a kind; it banished the shadows from your soul and took up residence in their place. You could never fail to recognize her because you would always carry some part of her, if only the moment of seeing her, with you. Helena turned around. She heard someone call out a name, Myka, but she knew all that she needed to know.

 **Myka**

She hadn't believed herself in the mirror. She knew she could clean up well, but she had never known that she could look –

"Ravishing? Breathtaking?" Gigi had caught her admiring herself.

Myka had lifted her shoulder – the one that wasn't holding up this shimmering, body-molding, I didn't-know-I-had-a-fairy-godmother dress – in embarrassed deprecation. Even though it was holding up her dress, her shoulder, not to mention the collarbone and arm to which it was attached, was bare, as was most of her back. She couldn't remember the last time she had shown this amount of skin in public, and she hadn't been at all sure she was ready for the VIPs at Nate Robinson's gala to be able to count the freckles on her back. Of course, one VIP at Nate's house was intimately acquainted with the freckles on her back, but the less she thought about Helena when she and Gigi were together the better. Feathering that hoydenish shoulder with kisses and then gliding her lips along the length of Myka's collarbone, Gigi had seemed only appreciative of her freckled skin. "You _are_ beautiful. Even when you're being bested in a pool by a group of pre-teen boys."

They had decided to meet in Gigi's downtown apartment before driving to Nate and Helena's home, and though Myka had admired the view of the city that the floor-to-ceiling windows offered, she had been most impressed by Gigi's master suite. To be honest, she had expected a seraglio because an ordinary queen-sized bed with a comforter from Wayfair would be ludicrous and . . . a denial of her talents. The last had crossed Myka's mind unbidden, but if she were to keep being honest, it was generally lurking somewhere in her mind every time she and Gigi were together. The bed was oversized, even for a king, but otherwise her bedroom was more executive boardroom than pleasure palace. The walk-in closet was, unsurprisingly, filled with the kind of clothes that an almost six foot former model would be expected to wear. What was surprising was how meticulously they were organized. Myka had been so happily dizzied by the realization that, if she hadn't been the kind of woman who could carry on an internal debate in the middle of a grocery store about the number of added grams of sugar in one brand of yogurt versus another, she might have asked Gigi to marry her then and there. With a connoisseur's eye, Myka had noted how dresses, skirts, pantsuits, and gowns had been grouped according to the formality of the event to which they would be worn, subdivided by designer or style (Myka wasn't sure which) and then, if she had to guess, by last time worn. In front of one wall was a three-panel mirror, and Myka hadn't tried very hard to banish thoughts of Gigi dressing and undressing in front of it.

The bathroom had the functional necessities of tub, shower, sink, and toilet, but it was fundamentally a salon and staging area combined. Together the bathroom and the bedroom were an operations center in which all the elements needed to transform one Kristen Schneider, a tall, striking, well-built woman "somewhere" in her 40s who exceeded her peers only in that she was somewhat taller than average, somewhat more attractive than average, and somewhat more proportional than average, into Gigi Fourier were collected. "There were dozens of girls like me in high school, sorta tall, sorta blond, sorta cute, and all named Kristen or Kirsten," Gigi had said, a wondering half-smile on her face. "I just wanted to be different more than they did." She had been setting out make-up, brushes, gels, sprays. "Larry was one of my high school teachers. At first I thought he was a dirty old man, although he was younger then than I am now, but he saw that I wanted more out of a life than a teaching degree and a husband with a pick-up truck. In place of head shots, he sent my senior pictures to a friend of his who ran a modeling agency in Chicago." Her smile had turned wry. "And thus a star was born." She had added, "Larry and I, we've spent years looking out for each other. People look at us and see what they will, but he's like a father and big brother both to me. There's no one I'm in interested in or involved with, Myka, except you."

She had set down a small jar to slip her arms around Myka's waist. "I don't think I've told anyone the name on my birth certificate since high school, and I've never explained what Larry and I are to each other. I've never thought it was important before."

Being held this close, seeing and feeling more of Gigi now than she had been permitted, or had permitted herself, as a result of their decision to take things slow, Myka had been very, very tempted to suggest they forget Nate Robinson's charity gala. Gigi in deshabille, free of make-up and of most of her clothes as well, was even more seductive than in full-on Giselle Fourier mode, possibly because seduction was the last thing on her mind. Maybe not the last thing, Gigi's breathing had altered and her thumbs were stroking surprisingly sensitive spots, so Myka was discovering, on her lower back. But Gigi was being honest and, above all, vulnerable, and that, in combination with the level of organization that this room displayed was heady enough for Myka to want to surrender everything, body and soul. She had the crazy impulse to cry out, "Marry me," which hadn't surged through her with such power since she had been with Helena, and, given the haze that was unfocusing Gigi's eyes, equal parts tenderness and desire, Gigi might even had said yes. Instead Myka had suggested weakly, "I guess we should get Cinderella ready for the ball," and, haze clearing, Gigi had just as reluctantly said, "The party, right."

What would have taken Myka at least an hour, maybe more, if she didn't fudge the time she spent changing her mind, Gigi had been able to accomplish in less than 20 minutes. The hair that Myka had despaired of coaxing or coercing into the upswept work of art that Gigi's stylist had tried to teach her to reproduce, Gigi had simply seemed to command into place, wielding brushes, combs, and pins with a dexterity that rivaled her stylist's. She had applied Myka's make-up just as efficiently, the pads of her fingers lightly, impersonally blending color and disguising blemishes. Standing back from Myka, Gigi had assessed her work, her eyes no longer the soft gray, almost like mist, that they had been a short while ago, but brighter, bluer, and harder, impervious like metal or ice, the manufacturer evaluating his product, the designer his model. Then her lips had curved into a dangerously sexy smile. "I have the most beautiful date in the city." She had led Myka to the mirror in the walk-in closet, and while Myka had pirouetted in front of it, Gigi had dressed and applied her own make-up with an efficiency that didn't speak only to her years as a model but also to the years she had spent preparing herself to stand in front of cameras denying rumors about corruption in the mayor's office.

Now standing beside her, listening to Gigi greet as friends people whom Myka had only encountered through photos in newspapers and on social media, she hugged that dangerously sexy smile and Gigi's accompanying claim that she was the "most beautiful date in the city" to her because she needed them. This party intimidated the hell out of her. Yes, Nate's guests were destroying the planet, but they were literally doing it in style. The very lack of ostentation – the jewelry was discreet, the fashion was discreet, the cosmetic surgery was discreet – spoke to the amount of money that was milling in this one room alone.

After air kissing an older couple and congratulating the man on the completion of a successful merger – "Larry would love it if you could bring those jobs to the city "– Gigi murmured to her, "Take a deep breath because we're going to start working that group of men close to the terrace."

"Which group? There's more than one. They're all crowded around the doors to the terrace like sharks drawn to blood," Myka nervously complained. The men weren't all white or middle-aged, but they all wore the same expression, a mix of boredom, which was mainly affected, and curiosity, which the boredom was supposed to disguise. Some had turned to look back into the room, clearly wanting to see who was watching them, waiting for the light of recognition and the accompanying flash of admiration or envy.

"The one that looks less predatory than the others," Gigi said, a hint of laughter in her voice. "They'll be the ones we work first. If we can get the little ones interested in your pitch, we'll work on the great whites."

"I don't have a pitch. I have a university that's on the verge of chopping the carrels and study tables in the library for firewood. I'm wearing the perfume of desperation," Myka said, her lips twisting into something she feared was closer to an anxious grimace than a smile.

Gigi's hint of laughter threatened to become real. "Don't forget, you have a very close associate of the mayor and likely future governor on your arm, and she smells enticingly of confidence . . . and influence." Her gaze warmed and deepened. "And she would do just about anything you asked."

It would be so easy, looking into those eyes, their silver turned smoky not only by very expertly applied shadow and mascara but also by feelings that Myka wasn't ready to name, so easy to fall . . . .Then she heard it, not a sound so much as a vibration, time, space, the universe separating, pulling apart like a curtain, revealing Helena on the other side. The school of sharks at the terrace had roiled when the doors opened and Helena stepped through. Her dress wasn't just a flare of color among the CEO blues and grays and the similarly conservative palette of their wives, it was a flame, and though the skin the dress exposed was all the more pale, as if the dress were drawing its fire from her, the darkness of her hair and eyes had an added luster. It wasn't too great a stretch of the imagination to believe that she would crumble into a pile of ashes once her dress was removed, and Myka could attest to the fact that if it had been Helena's intention to make a conflagration of the party, she was thoroughly burned.

Once they had become lovers, Helena would tease her about how the spectacle of her dancing had transfixed her. "Couldn't move, darling. I could only stare at you. How could you not feel it?"

Yet she hadn't. She had felt only the music and the release of the tension she had been feeling since the beginning of the semester. She had spent all summer working in her father's bookstore, which was slowly surrendering to the crushing force of the Barnes & Nobles and Borders of the world, and in the concession stand of a downtown art house during the evenings, longing for school to start. Having taken all the core courses, she could concentrate on her major (Humanities with an English Literature emphasis) and she would take with her all the cast-offs, ancient editions of Thackeray and Dickens and James and Melville, that her father threw into a box marked Myka's Library. Reading to her heart's content wasn't the only thing she was looking forward to. Chained to the concession stand, she hadn't been able to shut out the sounds of the endless orgasms escaping through the theater's doors. Was there no film made anymore in which people just talked? Preferably not about sex? It wasn't that she was a prude, well, she was, but the groans and the cries sounded disturbingly unfeigned, and it reminded her, in a painfully urgent way, of her other goal for her junior year, to pursue the relationship she had just embarked on with Christopher when the spring semester ended. He was smart and nerdy and looked a little like Luke Perry, if Dylan were a computer science major with only a dash of brooding and not an ounce of rebellion. They had done no more than kiss outside her dorm for a few minutes the night before her parents arrived to drive her the hundreds of miles back home. She was hoping that the kisses, which, in her limited experience, were pretty good, were a harbinger of better and more pleasurable things to come. Her sole sexual experience to date, a furtive series of late nights with a lacrosse player embarrassed to be seen with her in public, had been both illuminating and dispiriting.

So much promise . . . thoroughly crushed. The classes she had been anticipated taking that fall had been restructured and reassigned among the faculty over the summer. Instead of taking courses that would have required her to devour nineteenth century novels, she was stuck with Romantic poetry and Renaissance writers (not including Shakespeare). She would have suffered her disappointment better had she been able to further her education sentimentale, but, alas, Christopher had taken up with someone else during the break, a junior attending another school, and he had made it plain to Myka that they could be only friends. She had planned to spend the weekend burying herself in _The Brothers Karamazov_ , but her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend had talked her into attending the party and, once there, after a few shots of a Student Life Department-provided soft drink surreptitiously mixed with something that hadn't been provided, or approved, by the Student Life Department, they had talked her into dancing.

She hadn't thought about the party, in fact, couldn't recall the party with much clarity, when the Wednesday following it, a woman, her black hair sleekly, silkily fringing the shoulders of a shirt that looked like it had been kicked under a bed before she put it on, slouched into the seat next to her. The woman whispered loudly, "What class is this?"

"'Anglophone Literature During the Romantic Era,'" Myka said primly. The woman's dark eyes were angled above high cheekbones. Some might have said they had a naturally inquisitive cast, but Myka thought their angle lent her an expression that was more skeptical, even ironic, than inquisitive, which wasn't undercut by the amused look the woman was giving her. Myka heard herself say in a conspiratorial whisper, "Basically it's a class on the Romantic poets."

"'I'm certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.'" The woman shrugged. "Keats is part of my birthright."

Myka was forced to admit, if only to herself, that hearing Keats quoted with an English accent gave her a rush, even if the woman had been trying too hard to produce an effect. Smiling as if she knew her entrance had worked its magic, the woman introduced herself as Helena Wells. As Myka introduced herself in turn, she realized two things, Helena Wells wasn't enrolled in the class and she already knew her name. Which strongly suggested that the only reason Helena Wells was in this classroom at all was because of her. Which, in turn, should have made her feel stalked rather than charmed, but Myka wasn't scared, she was intrigued, and that led her to her third realization, she already liked Helena Wells.

 **Maddie**

There they were, Gigi, her mom, and Helena, smiling at each other and chatting, although Maddie felt there was something a little too tight about their smiles. They were beautiful, each in her own way, even her mom. Gigi was wearing her black dress as if she went to work every day in something figure-hugging with a short skirt. She wasn't teetering at all on really, really high heels. She wore them with the same comfort that her mom wore her Teva sandals. Helena, Helena was dramatic-looking in her blood red dress, but she had given Maddie a big wink earlier in the evening, as if she, too, couldn't believe that any of this was supposed to be taken seriously. Her mom, though, her mom didn't look at all like the woman who would routinely embarrass her by saying "I'm Maddie's mom" or "That's my daughter Maddie." This woman wouldn't be caught dead in a flannel nightshirt and fuzzy slippers on weekend mornings, and she wouldn't cry and get all red-faced with her nose seeming three times too big for her face when she watched shows like _Emergency Vet_ and _The Zoo_. This woman was much too cool and elegant for that. Maddie hadn't known until now that a Bering could be a swan.


End file.
